These Broken Souls
by KarmaHope
Summary: He realizes he should excuse himself sooner rather than later. He hasn't known this woman for an hour, and yet she's already drawing him in in a way no other has ever done before. But he's Soul Evans, and she's Major Albarn. He's the son of the most prestigious family in the galaxy, and she's a soldier; but they're in the same boat, the spaceliner 'Shibusen'. And they're falling.
1. Chapter 1

_This is my entry for Resbang 2015! The theme for this year was 'the road less traveled.' This story grew to be a lot bigger than I anticipated, but I finished it, and I'm so excited to present to you what I've been working on since August!_

 _I do not own Soul Eater, nor do I own the book_ These Broken Stars _, although I highly recommend it._

 _I have a few people I'd like to thank:_

 _First off, I'd like to thank the mods for organizing all this – honestly, it's the best put-together event I've seen in any fandom, and that's fantastic._

 _Second, I'd like to thank_ _ **FullMetalGrigori**_ _for editing the first few chapters for me. It was greatly appreciated._

 _Third, my absolutely amazing artist partner_ _ **Cojode**_ _! She did some fantastic art that you all should go see. The link is in my profile! I'd also like to thank her for giving me the feedback I so desperately needed at times._

 _And finally, a shoutout to Spotify's_ The Piano Bar _playlist, which I listened to the entire time I was writing this, and everyone who read/liked/etc my dumb ranting/progress posts on Tumblr. It's nice to know I'm not always just shouting into the void._

And now, without further ado …

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 **These Broken Souls** **  
**KarmaHope

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 **MAKA**

 _Nothing about this room is real._

Maka sighs, closing her eyes against the false reality around her. Had this been a _real_ party, like those she had been to back home, she would have been comfortable. She would have been there among friends and family alike, listening to music playing from the old record player. There would have been home-cooked food and laughter beneath dim yellow lamplight.

But with every breath, the sharp tang of filtered air reminds her that she is not back home. In fact, she's farther from home than she can ever remember being. When she opens her eyes again, it is to the harsh white fluorescence of artificial lighting that highlights the strangers around her all too well.

And it isn't just the strangers, dressed up in their faux-Victorian finery, that are false. Hover-trays dart among the elite, delivering neon-colored drinks to waiting hands. Perfect. Infallible. Fake. Across the grandiose ballroom, the hologram of a string quartet begins its set for the third time, and Maka knows that it will be exactly the same as the other two times they've 'played.'

Perfect. Infallible. Fake.

What she wouldn't give to be on the ground with her platoon at this moment, laughing with her squad in boots covered with mud. Instead, she's stuck at this party that appears to be something straight from a historical novel. Her only saving grace is that she's allowed to wear her dress uniform instead of being forced into one of the ridiculous dresses the other ladies wear, even if the uniform cap is stiff and uncomfortable.

But for all the illusion of Victorian grandeur, there is no hiding the viewports in the side of the _Shibusen_. Beyond the transparent space-age material, the stars stretch into lines of white, etched into the blackness of dimensional hyperspace. For a moment, Maka wonders idly if the _Shibusen_ would appear just as stretched-out to an outside observer, and then laughs quietly.

It's when she leans back against the bookshelves behind her that she realizes there is one thing here that's as real as she is – the books. Her hand falls back to caress the spines, and she revels in the feel of the leather bindings against her fingers as she pulls one from its place. She loves books. Books are what allowed her to work her way up from the bottom.

 _And had landed her here_ , the part of her brain she doesn't like to listen to reminds her. She barely keeps herself from rolling her eyes. One would think that the paparazzi would have had their fill of her by now – would have taken her picture several billion times and been satisfied. But she knows that's hardly the case, and plasters a smile onto her face that's as fake as the rest of her surroundings.

The other fakes are never able to tell the difference.

She's not the most interesting person that any of them will ever meet, and yet there's something fascinating about a rags-to-riches story that absolutely ensnares audiences. She nearly snorts at the thought. Her 'riches' amount to a couple medals pinned to her chest. She wears them with pride, sure, but they aren't all that the media cracks them up to be.

She may have saved a few civilians and some members of her platoon, but a whole lot more people had ended up dead. What others call heroics, she calls a tragic debacle – but no one ever asks her for _her_ opinion.

Scanning the crowd with a causal eye, she seriously considers packing it in and going back to her quarters. She's done her time; she's smiled for the cameras and interacted with creepy men and tittering women who would never glance at her twice otherwise. But when her gaze falls upon a man in a worn waistcoat and a tattered top hat, her pulse kicks up a beat. This man doesn't belong here – not among the rest of the elite who have hardly a stitch out of place.

Clenching her hands tighter around the book she still carries, she longs for the feel of her weapon – her scythe – in her hands instead. She usually never goes anywhere without it, but she had not been permitted to carry it with her to the party. She understands why, of course, but it's a silly rule, especially in instances like these.

She takes a step forward, hoping to catch the man and ask him why he's here, but is instead swept up in a whirlwind of handsy men and fangirls. She barely manages to make it through the encounter with her dignity intact. She turns towards where she last saw the man, but she's lost him.

"Major Albarn!" a photographer calls, "A picture, please!" She tries to excuse herself only to be ambushed by yet another flashbulb from yet another photographer. By the time she manages to escape, she feels the telltale signs of an oncoming headache.

Biting her bottom lip, she scans the room once again, this time less casually than before. She's at a bit of a disadvantage – she's not very tall, and her vision swims with afterimages left by the flashbulbs. She frantically tries to remember if the man could have been holding a weapon underneath his ill-fitting suit.

In her sweep of the room, her eyes catch upon a man, but not the one she is looking for. He sits by himself at one of the booths, dressed in a pinstripe suit over a mahogany shirt. His hair, which is shockingly as white as snow, is gelled back sleekly.

There's something about the way he carries himself that tells her he is unmistakably one of _them_ – one of the fakes – and yet at the same time he is somehow above them, completely and utterly untouchable in his perfection. She doesn't recognize him, and yet she feels that she should. He plays idly with the condensation left on the tabletop with a single finger, and Maka forces herself to look away.

Almost immediately, her eyes fall upon the man she's looking for – the one with the strange eye and the shaggy hair and the ratty suit.

And he's unmistakably making his way toward the man sitting at the booth.

Maka pushes through the crowd, but for once her diminutive size is a hindrance rather than an asset, and even the muscles she developed over years at the Academy and out in the field do nothing to part the masses of people any faster. By the time she pushes free of the crowd, the strange man has his hand around the white-haired man's wrist. He's saying something, and the white-haired man shakes his head. Sadly? Maka can't tell.

Her hand drifts toward where the handle of scythe would be, and finds nothing. But even as she does so, she sees one of the properly-suited guests grab the intruder's shoulder and yank him backwards. He is caught by a pair of guards who begin shoving him toward the door. Maka winces at the display of unnecessary force.

The man rips himself from the guards' arms and turns back to the white-haired man, who Maka decides to call Pinstripes for lack of a better option. "Please!" he shouts, and it's audible over the sudden silence. "The prison conditions in the colonies are deplorable! The inmates – they keep –"

He's cut off by a vicious blow to the stomach from one of the guards. Maka runs forward, intent on doing something – _anything_ – but before she can, Pinstripes stands swiftly. His presence is commanding, and it draws the attention of the crowd.

"Enough," he snaps, his tone that of a man who is used to being listened to. "Captain, Lieutenant. What are you doing?"

Maka thinks this is what impresses her more than anything else.

She straightens her cap – knocked askew by the crowd – and steps forward, her figure strikingly frail-looking when compared to the four men currently locked in a silent combat of wills. It takes a moment for the soldiers notice her. When they do, they see first her dress blues, then her stars and bars, and then finally her face. She clenches her jaw against the irritation she feels when surprise and doubt flash across their expressions.

They can doubt her all they like, but the fact is her medals were earned in combat, not behind a desk. They have never seen bloodshed in their lives, and she has seen too much of it. And yet, she finds it oh-so-satisfying when they reluctantly come to attention. They're both older than she is, and male, and she knows they hate the fact that they have to salute her, an eighteen-year-old female.

One of the men still holds the intruder, who is petrified.

Maka clears her throat, making sure her voice is even when she says, "If there's a problem, I can show this man out." _Without more violence_ goes unspoken.

She barely controls a cringe, because everyone can hear how her voice sounds – high and feminine. She hears laughter behind her.

"I doubt he wants the book, Miss Albarn," one of the guards says. Maka looks down at the book she still holds in her hands, ignoring the slight against her rank. Again, she bites back a retort.

"Actually," the commanding voice breaks in once more, "I think he was about to go. And _you_ were too, I believe."

The men are shocked by Pinstripes's dismissal, and Maka takes the opportunity to lead the intruder away from them and out the door. As soon as they're out of sight, she turns to him and meets his mismatched eyes. "Are you okay?" she asks. "Why did you do that? You looked like you were going to kill someone!"

He opens his mouth as if to respond, but instead shakes his head and shuffles away. Maka watches until he rounds a corner and is gone. Whoever he was, he must have had a lot riding on his failed encounter with Pinstripes.

Maka pushes him out of her thoughts as she returns to the ballroom. In the mere seconds she has been gone, the altercation has already been forgotten and the party guests are back to their schmoozing and dancing. Typical. She sighs.

When she looks up, she catches Pinstripes's eyes on her. She meets his gaze, and the corner of his mouth twitches into a wry smile. He gestures minutely to the seat across the table from him, and Maka's heart leaps into her throat.

No, she tells herself as she steps forward, it's not because he's attractive – although he certainly is. It's not because of his crooked smile or the way he handled the situation minutes earlier. It's simply because she is unused to such attention from such men. He is obviously an important figure, to boss the guards around like that. She doesn't want to look bad in front of him.

But is she supposed to be Maka, the eighteen-year-old girl right now? Or is she supposed to be Major Albarn?

"Major Albarn." Pinstripes answers the question for her. "Thank you for your assistance with the issue."

His voice now carries a lazy drawl with it, and Maka finds herself fighting a blush. "I believe you were the one who had it well under control, sir," she says as she takes a tentative seat across the booth from him, removing her cap and setting it beside her.

"But having _the_ Major Albarn to back me up didn't hurt at all," the man says, leaning back in his seat. A sudden look of uncertainty crosses his face. "Can I – uhm – buy you a drink?"

Maka hides a smile as he stumbles. She had assumed he was the same as the others – namely, fake – but his nervousness brings some reality back into the white hair and the pinstripe suit. She does smile, but it's the controlled one she's gotten good at. The one she shows to the press. "I'll allow it," she says, "if you tell me your name."

His eyes widen in either surprise or shock, Maka can't tell which. Her heart misses a beat when she realizes his eyes are as red as the shirt he wears; a deep sanguine that both scares her and pulls her in. It's almost like she can see straight through to his – "Soul."

"Excuse me?"

"Soul," he says for what must have been the second time. "It's my name."

"Oh, right," Maka says. "I'm sorry." There's something about the name that triggers her memory, although what exactly it triggers, she cannot figure out. She doesn't miss the fact that he neglects to give her a last name, but she disregards it. Instead, she looks up at him evenly. "Now, how about that drink?"


	2. Chapter 2

**SOUL**

Soul finds himself fascinated by the girl who sits before him. When he invited her over to his table, he hadn't known how she would react. This young woman has accomplished more at eighteen than he has at twenty, or likely ever will. Some would say he has already accomplished enough simply by being an Evans, but he disagrees.

There is something in the way she sits across from him, her words confident and perhaps even a bit flirtatious if read in a certain light, that doesn't quite disguise her uncertainty. She's not used to scenes like the one around them, and it shows to the experienced eye.

None of the reporters have noticed it. None of them would.

But Soul simply says, "Of course," before flagging down a hover-tray laden with cocktails in colors that could never be natural. She picks a neon red one. He chooses a radioactive shade of green.

They sip their drinks in silence for several moments. Soul does not stop to ask himself why he invited her over, nor does he ask why she accepted. She doesn't, either, and the unspoken implications yawn between them like an inescapable black hole, sucking them both toward whatever ultimatum it is they're headed for.

He vaguely wonders if his friend Blake is ever going to meet him like he said he would. At the same time, though, he knows that if Blake does show up then his time with Major Albarn will be over. Somehow, for some inexplicable reason, he finds himself wishing his friend doesn't appear.

An unladylike snort escapes her, breaking the silence and pulling his thoughts back around to the present. "I may have had a ninety percent hit accuracy in the Academy," she says, "but I think right now those girls there might be breaking my record."

Soul follows her gaze to where a gaggle of finely-dressed young society woman stand, shooting dangerously sharp looks at the girl in uniform. "I may not be military, but I'm pretty sure last I checked, jealous looks weren't fatal."

"It depends," Major Albarn says, and he turns to meet her eyes. "It all depends on the girl's position and connections." They're green. They're oh-so-green, like the color of the grass on his home planet at the height of spring before it darkens into its summer shade. He nearly misses her next words. "Your fiancée isn't going to have her father make me mysteriously disappear, is she?"

He chokes on his drink at the word 'fiancée,' inadvertently distracting himself from the deep green eyes that have already seen far more horrors than any one person should ever have to see in her lifetime. He sputters ungracefully as he swallows and pulls himself together.

"No," he says finally, flushing under the major's scrutiny. "No fiancée yet … not for lack of my mother trying, though." He practically kicks himself – could he be any less cool?

Major Albarn laughs. It's not the tinkling laugh of the society girls, but the full-bodied laugh of a soldier, even if she does keep it quiet. "I think I have the opposite problem," she admits, taking another sip of her neon drink. "My father has been trying to keep me _away_ from boys for as long as I can remember."

"And how's that working out for him?"

There's a twinkle in those green eyes of hers that relaxes him as much as it sets his heart off-kilter. She leans forward conspiratorially, as if she's about to share a secret she doesn't want anyone else to hear. He finds himself gravitating towards her as well. "I joined the military, didn't I?"

She leans back then, incredibly pleased with herself, and it's Soul's turn to chuckle. "Indeed you did," he says.

They fall back into silence, but this time it's not a black hole that lies between them. Rather, it's a star field – the same star field they're traversing with every passing second, the endless possibilities laid out before them in pinpricks of brilliant light.

Brilliant, Soul thinks, but just as dangerous if one gets too close.

The girl across from him swishes the remnants of her carmine drink in the bottom of the glass. She stares into the swirling liquid, and for a moment, her persona drops. Her eyes take on a haunted gaze, and her posture slips from that of a proud uniformed soldier into that of a defeated teenager. Soul wonders just what it is she has seen. He's watched the newscasts, of course, but he knows that most everything on the holos these days has been twisted so that it's portrayed some light or another.

He doesn't ask.

"You know," he drawls instead, "most soldiers would go after an intruder with a weapon, not a book."

His words startle her – she flinches, and had the glass been full, her drink would have spilled over the table. Almost immediately her posture rights itself and her eyes lose their glassiness. She glances down at the book on the table and flushes in embarrassment.

"Don't you know?" she says, grinning at him brightly, "Books are the best weapons in the world!"

Soul raised his eyebrows. "So that's how you do it in the military? Brain your opponents with" – he glances at the title written upon the cover – " _Mass Casualty: A History of Failed Campaigns_ _?_ Seems kind of ironic to me."

Major Albarn simply rolls her eyes. "It's more effective than you think," she says. "I would demonstrate if I didn't think I would be arrested for assault and battery on the great Soul …" she trails off awkwardly when she realizes she still doesn't know his last name, and covers her fumble by downing the rest of her drink. Her ponytail bounces as she tosses her head back.

He follows suit, draining his glass of its last vestiges of vibrant green liquid. He places it down with a satisfying _clink_ when he finishes, and grins. She smiles back, and before he can even think about what he's saying he suggests, "Another round?"

"I really shouldn't," she protests with a sigh. "I've got combat practice in the morning with the rest of the troops …"

"Come on," Soul urges, despite the feeling in the pit of his stomach that tells him he's making a terrible mistake. "How many of the other guys have shown up to practice hungover before? What makes _you_ special, Major Albarn?"

"Well, I suppose if you put it that way," she says, considering. "Fine. But I'm paying." Before he can say anything otherwise, she waves down the hover-tray.

He picks a red drink this time. There is nothing about red that reminds him of her. In passing, he takes note of the fact that her drink is now green. They have simply switched colors, and he wonders idly whether she chose her drink for the same reason he chose his.

As he swirls the vermillion liquid, he realizes he should excuse himself sooner rather than later. He hasn't known this woman for even an hour, and yet she is already drawing him in in a way no other has ever done before. But he's Soul Evans, and she's Major Albarn.

He takes a deep drink to distract himself, and that's when it happens.

The _Shibusen_ shudders. The floor bucks and heaves beneath the people on the dance floor, and all sense of elegance is lost as women and men alike lose their balance and stumble into one another. Books fall off the shelves lining the room. The holo-band plays on as if nothing happened.

Soul's face and suit are now drenched with the majority of his drink. He places the empty glass back on the table as he covers his mouth and chin with one hand, reaching for the napkin that came with the drink, probably for instances like these. He takes a moment to be thankful for the fact his shirt is already red, and not white like many of the other partygoers.

When he has his face wiped off, leaving his expensive suit as a lost cause, he looks back toward Major Albarn. She's sitting alert in her seat, unmindful of the fact her own drink has spilled over into her lap. Her hand creeps to her side, as if to grab a weapon, and she's tensed as if to spring into action at the smallest provocation.

Soul hasn't had much experience with soldiers, and yet somehow, her reaction is unsurprising. "What _was_ that?" he asks.

"I don't know," she murmurs, her eyes still fixed upon some point in the distance, "but whatever it was, I don't like it."

Soul agrees. In the weeks he's been on the _Shibusen_ , she's been nothing but stable. Something is not right. Another tremor wracks its way through the ship's infrastructure, confirming his conjecture.

"Stay here," Major Albarn orders, and suddenly she's standing, scooping up her uniform cap and jamming it back on her head. "I'm going to go find out what's going on."

Soul catches her wrist. He shouldn't be doing this. He's the Evans Boy. He's expected to sit quietly and have everything in life delivered to him because of who is family is. He's going to cause a scene, and it's going to be splashed all over the papers, but he knows he cannot allow her to go on her own.

"I'm coming with you," he says with the same confidence he used with the soldiers less than an hour earlier.

She opens her mouth. She's about to protest, but she's cut off by yet another tremor and the subsequent crackling as the ship's intercom comes to life.

The woman's voice is calm and smooth, but there's an underlying urgency to it.

" _Attention all passengers. In a few moments we will be cycling the ship's hyperspace engines. This procedure forms a part of our routine maintenance of the Shibusen. You may notice some minor vibrations. Thank you for your understanding as we carry out this routine maintenance."_

Several seconds pass. "Fine," Major Albarn says, shaking his hand from her wrist. He tries to ignore the tingles that are left behind. "We need to get out of this ballroom. Did you notice how she said 'routine maintenance' twice? Something is definitely not right, and I do _not_ want to be in here when the shit hits the fan."

Soul may never have had to work for anything in his life, but he's not stupid. He too had picked up on the woman's slip of the tongue, and he agrees with the major wholeheartedly. "Let's go," he says. Major Albarn doesn't hesitate.

The other partygoers still mill about on the dance floor, most of them placated by the woman's words. Those who aren't stand in tense huddles, murmuring to each other in harsh whispers and worried voices. Others are just too drunk to care.

So for a moment, Soul thinks no one will notice when he and the major slip out the door through which the intruder had left less than an hour ago. He should have known better, he realizes in retrospect, when the unmistakable flash of the photographers' cameras follow them out. He winces. Their picture is going to be all over the tabloids in the coming days. He can see the headlines now.

'Evans Son and War Hero Major Albarn – Secret Affair?'

He's a dead man walking. If Major Albarn doesn't kill him, his family certainly will. There is a reason the Evanses don't mingle with the 'riffraff,' as his mother would say. Of course, it hadn't stopped his brother any.

Another violent tremor ripples through the corridor, and Soul trips out of his train of thought. His hands barely break his fall, and within seconds, he's scrambling to his feet again in an attempt not to lose Major Albarn, who hasn't so much as stumbled. Not seconds pass before the largest quake yet sends them both staggering into the wall.

The intercom buzzes again, and this time, there is no doubt. The woman is frantic, trying to hide her fear but failing terribly.

" _Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. We have experienced difficulty with our hyperspace engines, and the Shibusen has suffered substantial damage as a result of the dimensional displacement. We will attempt to keep the ship in hyperspace, but in the meantime, please follow the illuminated strips in the corridors and make your way to your assigned emergency pods immediately."_

"Is this what you call 'shit hitting the fan,' Major?" he asks breathlessly, already exhausted by the physical exertion.

Major Albarn glances back at him and, seeing how far behind her he is, slows her pace so that he can catch up. "Yeah," she says, as if she hasn't spent the past few minutes sprinting, "and it's only going to get worse."

People stream into the corridors, and Soul presses himself closer to the major. His shoulder brushes against hers, and the annoying tingles return, but he decides it doesn't matter. He knows that if he's going to make it out of this unexpected tragedy alive, there's no one better to stay beside.


	3. Chapter 3

**MAKA**

She's not running toward the emergency pods.

She will, of course. She's not naïve enough to think the _Shibusen_ will right herself. With the way the ship is shaking and with all the prior experience she's had with ships going down, she knows it's dumb to stay aboard. The floor quivers beneath her once again, and she grips the handrail of the steps she's climbing. In any normal circumstances, she would have taken the elevator – but at the moment, she wouldn't get on the elevator if someone paid her a million credits.

Behind her, she can hear the labored breathing of the socialite she picked up somewhere between _"If there's a problem, I can show this man out,"_ and _"Soul – it's my name."_ There is something about him that ensnares her – perhaps it's the depths of his sanguine eyes, or the intriguing stark white of his hair.

But none of that matters if he's just going to slow her down and get them both killed.

Maka admits to herself that she's impressed with how well he's managed to keep up so far. These stairs are taking a toll on him, though, and she can't say that she blames him. They're swimming upstream – the panicked masses have streamed out into the hallways, making it almost impossible to maneuver their way back to her quarters.

She should have taken them straight to the emergency pods. She knows which one she's assigned to. Hopefully, Soul knows his. She shouldn't have let the man come with her – it's entirely possible that _she's_ just going to get them both killed.

But her scythe is in her room, and she now understands why soldiers are ordered not to become emotionally attached to their weapons. Alas, it's too late for her to change her ways now – that scythe is the same one she took away from her father's farm when she joined the Academy. She's not leaving it behind to be crushed to bits and lost in the midst of a spacewreck.

Besides, every soldier keeps a grab bag handy, filled with the things she might need at a moment's notice. Some of her most prized possessions are in that bag, along with a hardly-used blaster and several days' worth of rations. If she's going to be stranded in an escape pod for an indeterminate amount of time, she wants that bag.

They're almost at her cabin now, and as much as she's uncomfortable with having Soul in her rooms – in the only space where she could _escape_ the elite from time to time – she knows it's extremely likely that if she leaves him outside she would lose him in the ever-increasing mob of people. Panicked people. And so when she finally gets the palm scanner to read her print correctly on the second try, she grabs him by the lapel of his immaculate, if stained, pinstriped suit and yanks him in after her.

"Hey, what –"

"Did you _want_ to be swept down the hallway?" she asks fiercely. Maka looks away from those eyes, now wide with concern and terror and confusion, and lets go of his suit. She resists the urge to smooth out the wrinkles she leaves behind and grabs her pack – which is nothing more than a worn knapsack – from where it hangs over the foot of her bed. It's right in plain sight, where she can find it in a hurry if need be.

Her scythe rests in the nearest corner of the room, although where it had been propped upright before, it has since fallen over. She picks it up as soon as her bag is looped over her shoulders, checking it briefly for scuffs. She doesn't have time to put the holster on over her dress uniform, so she stuffs the useless mess of straps into her knapsack. Getting everything she needs takes a matter of seconds, and then she and Soul – who has been watching her in bewilderment – are out the door and in the giant mass of people once again.

The door of the next cabin over slides open, and Maka hears Soul gasp when a head of bright blue hair stumbles out. Behind the man with the blue hair is a woman in a tank top and fatigue pants who is startlingly familiar. Shockingly familiar, in fact.

"Blake?"

"Tsubaki?"

Soul speaks at the same time she does, and the two glance over at them sharply. They're obviously just as startled to see her and Soul as she and Soul are to see them, and their faces light in recognition.

"Soul!"

"Maka!"

Both Soul and Maka glance at each other in surprise, but then Tsubaki and Blake, the blue-haired man, are beside them.

"Sorry I never made it to the party, man. I was a bit … _busy_ … if you get my drift." Blake nudges Soul in the side, and Tsubaki blushes furiously and refuses to meet Maka's eyes.

"Seriously, Blake? This ship is _falling to pieces_ , and all you can think about is sex? You should have been out of your cabin ages ago!"

As if to punctuate his point, the _Shibusen_ shudders violently yet again, sending the four into the stream of traffic. Panicked, Maka grabs Soul's hand with the hand that isn't holding her scythe. She could handle this on her own, she knows she could. But it's so much easier with other people, even if two of them now are the socialites she has been trying to avoid for the majority of this voyage.

"What can I say?" she hears Blake's voice, and although she doesn't know him, she's glad that he's still with them. It means Tsubaki probably is as well. "I'm a god – and I think 'Baki agrees with me."

"Shut up, Blake!"

Tsubaki's voice is high and shrill, which is a complete change from the calm and controlled tone that the Lieutenant Nakatsukasa that Maka has sparred with many times in the training rooms usually employs. In all actuality, Tsubaki is probably the best friend she has on the _Shibusen_. Maka makes a mental note to grill her about her relationship with the blue-haired man. That is, if they get out alive.

Because even if she is Major Albarn, War Hero, currently trying to survive a spacewreck … she's still an eighteen-year-old girl.

They're out on the catwalks now, the breathtaking pieces of architecture that crisscross though the cavernous expanse of the _Shibusen_. Maka was trying to avoid them – with crowds of people this big, this panicked, the thin bridges aren't safe. But here she is, with not only herself to worry about, but three others as well. She knows she should just leave them behind; she should get to her assigned pod and leave the others to fend for themselves, but she can't. She can't bring herself to do it.

She couldn't when it was just Soul. And now it's not just Soul, but his friend Blake and her own friend Tsubaki, and she'll be damned if any of them die on her watch. She's going to get them off this ship if it's the last thing she does.

It's the same fatal flaw that led to her being hailed as a war hero.

The _Shibusen_ jerks again, and Maka stumbles. She's too close to the edge, she realizes. She's way too close to the edge for comfort, and yet moving back into the center of the stampede – for that's what it is – could be just as lethal. Even in the minutes they've been running, she's seen at least three people trip and fall only to be trampled and left for dead by the masses. So she readjusts the grip she has on her scythe and the hand she hadn't realized she was still holding, and charges on forward.

But then the ship shudders aggressively, the groaning and creaking of metal and plastene shooting straight down her spine. The frightened passengers shriek, and began pushing; shoving...

And then the _Shibusen_ begins to list to one side.

Maka's heart shoots up into her throat. She's slipping, slipping ... she lets go of Soul's hand, and even as she mourns the sudden loss of heat and reassurance, she's pushing him back into the crowd of people. The _Shibusen_ gives another impressive heave, and then she's off her feet and tumbling over the edge of the catwalk before she can even comprehend what's just happened.

"Maka!" Soul's anguished cry of her given name echoes through the poorly-designed cavern, and she cannot tell whether it's due to that or the fact she's tumbling to her doom that she cannot catch an even breath. Part of her wants to dwell on it, but the other part – the more rational part of her – doesn't waste a millisecond.

Even as other unfortunate souls plummet past her, her body goes on autopilot; the years she spent training with her scythe at the Academy do her proud. Her reflexes serve her as well now as they did during the disaster back in Death City as she twists her body around and raises her scythe with both hands. Her shoulders scream as they catch the brunt of her weight, the sickle blade against the plastene railing the only thing preventing her from becoming a splat amongst the bowels of the ship. Her uniform cap is not so fortunate, and it tumbles down into the unknown without her.

But now she's dangling, and her grip is slipping even on the roughened surface of the handle. "Soul!" she cries, her voice rising desperately on the tail end of his name.

Against her better sense, Maka looks down. She sees the masses of people on the catwalks beneath her – _so_ far beneath her – and even farther beyond that, the belly of the ship. She knows it will take only a minor shiver from the _Shibusen_ to dislodge her from her precarious position, and she's seized with fear as she averts her eyes back up to the catwalk above her.

And then he's there, his red eyes and now-disheveled shock of white hair peering down at her over the edge of the catwalk. Beside him is Blake, with an equally horrified expression on his face, and even the ever-calm Tsubaki looks frantic. Soul leans over the railing as best he can, and Blake grabs onto him to prevent him from falling while Tsubaki steadies the blade of the scythe. He extends his hand – but there are still several feet between his fingers and where hers would be if she reached up.

It may be several feet, but it could be several miles for all that her heart sinks. She takes a steadying breath. "Hold on," she grinds out.

Very cautiously, she lets go of the blade handle with one hand and reaches higher. Gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulders, she pulls herself upward. She switches hands, and then repeats the process. As soon as she's able, she grabs the shaft between her knees to provide some support.

After several long, agonizing seconds, she's just enough in range to graze his fingertips when she reaches out. But it's not enough. Her shoulders are screaming, her arms feel like limp spaghetti, and she knows the insides of her knees are going to be horribly bruised, but she keeps going. One hand over the other. One hand over the other ...

And then the _Shibusen_ shivers.

Maka cries out in agony as her abused shoulders are jostled, her knuckles going even whiter as she clings to the staff for dear life. Soul lunges forward; Blake barely manages to keep him from flying over the edge. He calls out her given name once again, and it's enough to spur Maka into reaching out for his wrist. She knows he's expecting her to grab his hand, but this isn't the first time she's had to be lifted by someone. Her grip is nearly gone, but it's enough to last until he grabs her wrist in return.

Never has she been more grateful for the fact she's tiny; it make it easier for him to lift her away from certain doom. As soon as she's close enough, she feels other sets of hands on her as well – Blake and Tsubaki, lifting her over the railing. She screams as one of them pulls her arm in the wrong direction, and then both her feet are on the ground and she feels like puking and sobbing but she manages to pull herself together. She has to get them all to an escape pod, or at the very least off this goddamn catwalk.

Panting heavily, she yanks her scythe out of the railing where it dug itself a groove in the plastene. Maka knows that if the railing had been metal, the blade would have slipped and she'd have been a dead woman anyway. She tries not to dwell on the thought.

"Are you okay?" someone – it can only be Soul – asks.

"Fine," she answers curtly, rolling her shoulders in an attempt to loosen them up. "Come on; let's get off this fucking deathtrap."


	4. Chapter 4

**SOUL**

Never in his twenty years of life has Soul ever experienced anything so frightening.

Sure, the spacewreck is plenty frightening in and of itself, but looking back on it, hearing the announcement to evacuate to the escape pods had not scared him in the same way that seeing Major Albarn topple over the edge of the catwalk had. Her verdant green eyes had locked with his; the absolute sheer terror within them so uncharacteristic of the soldier the media makes her out to be.

Soul cannot remember with any great clarity the events that transpired immediately thereafter. He barely even remembers calling her name and reaching down to her. He knows he did so, but the memory feels like that of an outsider looking in; as if it was not he who had done so, but some other man with the same face.

The adrenaline is wearing off now – it's all he can do to keep running after the major. His legs feel as if they've turned to cooked spaghetti beneath him, and he stumbles more than once only to have Major Albarn snatch his wrist and yank him back to his feet each time. His skin burns where she touches him.

Soul looks back, and is relieved to see that Blake and the girl named Tsubaki are still directly behind them. Blake Barrett is perhaps the only friend he's had in the weeks that the Shibusen has been in space, so despite his rather annoying tendencies, he's the only other person that Soul would want by his side in such an event. And now that he's met Tsubaki – as much as one can meet another person in the middle of a spacewreck – he knows just what Blake had been doing whenever he snuck off with some sketchy excuse or another, leaving Soul to navigate the hellish waters of high society alone.

"Are we almost there yet?" It's Blake that complains – of course it is. Beside Soul, Major Albarn tenses.

"There's been a change of plans," she says tersely as she shoves her way past another few people who aren't moving fast enough for her taste. "None of us were assigned to the same escape pod, and we don't have the time to find our assigned pods now. Tsubaki would be a couple decks down at least, and our best bet of getting out alive is if we stick together."

"So what are we going to do?" Soul asks.

"We're going to take one of the pods on this deck. I doubt that there's going to be any sense of order once we get there, so we're just going to find a pod and get into it."

Soul's legs give out underneath him, and once again, the major pulls him roughly to his feet. "We're almost there," she mutters.

"But what about everyone else?" Tsubaki asks. "That pod will have been assigned to someone, Maka. What if they don't survive because of us?"

"Then tough luck," Major Albarn says coldly. "Tsubaki, I wish we could save everyone, but the fact is, we can't. And if it comes down to a choice between us or some random person … I'm choosing us."

The unspoken reprimand hangs heavy in the air, but it isn't long before it's dispelled by slightly more urgent matters. The group of four turns down the main escape pod corridor, where they're met by a massive wall of people. Soul watches with wide eyes as formerly prim-and-proper socialites push and shove each other in their desperation to get to the pods and to perceived safety.

"Maka," Tsubaki says hesitantly, "our best bet is probably the pods at the end – no one can get down there." The only answer is a grim nod. "How are we going to do it?"

The major stands with her feet splayed and her free hand on her hip, her scythe held in the other by her side. She does not move, even when the other three bump into her as they're jostled around by the crowd. She takes a deep breath, and at last she speaks.

"Soul, Blake," she says, "I need you to lift me onto your shoulders. I need some height. Now," she snaps when Soul hesitates. Her tone is that of a woman who's used to giving orders, and having those orders obeyed.

Soul does the best he can – it's not easy to stay steady when one is being pushed around by hundreds of people. Beside him, Blake is doing just the same. The major stands on their shoulders – stands, not sits, with their arms and hands supporting her calves. She keeps her balance extraordinarily well, and Soul marvels at it for approximately three seconds before his eardrum is blown out.

"SHUT THE _FUCK_ UP! EVERYBODY _STOP_!"

Her voice is pitched so that it carries through the corridor, audible even over the noise level of the fracas before them. Slowly, heads begin to turn until they're all facing the major perched atop two shoulders, scythe in hand.

"Did you pick that up yourself, or do they teach it special?" Soul asks.

"They teach it special," the major says dismissively before turning back to the crowd before her. "Look," she continues in that same pitch, looking out over the crowd. "This fighting is just wasting time, and you don't have much time to waste."

As if to punctuate her words, the _Shibusen_ shudders viciously. Major Albarn nearly falls off her perch, but Soul and Blake manage to steady themselves and catch her just in time.

"At this point, it doesn't matter who was assigned to what pod," the major says as soon as she recovers herself. "Just _get the fuck in one_. It doesn't matter if you're with friends or family or your worst enemy. You're all going to end up just as _dead_ if you don't work this out!" She takes a deep breath.

"AND I NEED THAT POD AT THE VERY END SO GET THE _FUCK_ OUT OF MY WAY!"

She gestures with her scythe, and suddenly the crowd is very willing to do as she says. Sighing, she jumps off her shoulder perch. "Come on," she mutters. "I doubt they're going to remain complacent for very long. You know how this lot gets."

Soul barely keeps his mouth from hanging open like a dumbass. Major Albarn may have been out of her element at the soirée earlier that evening – _was it really just earlier that evening?_ – but here, she commands the floor. It's hard to believe that she's only eighteen.

He doesn't have time to think about it, as he's once again pushing his way through the crowd. He imagines what his parents might say if they saw him in the state he's in now. His mother would be in conniptions at the sight of his now-stained, now-rumpled suit and mussed hair – not to mention the company he's keeping.

He snorts at the thought. Who cares what his parents would think? He certainly doesn't.

And then, as if by magic, they're at the end of the hall. Suddenly it all seems _real_. The ship is wrecking. He is on this ship that is wrecking. He is about to jettison off this ship that is wrecking and into lord-knows-where. Distantly, he feels his breathing become more and more uneven, even more so than it had when Major Albarn went over the side of the catwalk.

"Soul?"

He hears his name being called, but it's all he can do to keep air circulating through his lungs. He's never really thought about what it would be like to die. He never thought he'd be in a situation where the knowledge would be relevant – not for a very long time, at least. And now –

Now a small, callused hand grabs the lapel of his suit and hauls him into the pod. Soul stumbles onto the cold metal grating. When he looks up, he's met with an even colder emerald stare as the door slams shut behind him. The countdown timer to the automated ejection begins.

"You've made it this far," Major Albarn says firmly, though not unkindly. "Don't flake out on me now."

Soul nods dumbly as he recovers his breathing. "Yeah," he says, "okay." Still floating hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from any planet, he manages to ground himself in the green of her eyes. It's only when she looks away that he realizes there's someone else already in the pod.

Actually, make that three someones.

"Who are you?" he asks, twenty years' worth of etiquette lessons forgotten in the aftermath of his panic. There's a man – who seems vaguely familiar – and two women staring down at him.

"The ones assigned to this pod," says the woman with long dirty-blonde hair, "so you lot can go find your own."

"Hey!" Blake shouts, taking offense. "You dare suggest that –" a touch on his forearm by Tsubaki shuts him up before he can make the situation worse. Reluctantly, he allows the long-haired soldier to lead him to one of the seats

"Elizabeth," the man in the middle sighs, "I'm sure they have good reason for being here, and as our companions never showed up, there are enough seats for them."

Elizabeth sighs as she runs perfectly manicured fingers through hair that was no doubt elegantly coiffed at one point earlier in the night. Now it just hangs limply down to her shoulders. "Fine."

"Hey – I recognize you!" the girl sitting on the man's other side says excitedly, straining at her harness and pointing at the major.

Soul is the only one who hears Major Albarn mutter, "I'm sure you do," as she stows her bag and scythe. The only thing that stops him from laughing is the fact that he's trying to figure out the mess of straps that is the safety harness. Beside him, the major has no issue, strapping herself in with the efficiency of one who is practiced in such things. Tsubaki is the same way.

Soul takes comfort in the fact that Blake, too, is struggling.

"Yes, Patty. She's been on the holos. Major Albarn, isn't it?" the man asks, "It's an honor to meet you. And you, too," he says, turning to Soul. "Evans, right?"

Soul's heart plummets down into the pit of his stomach, wallowing like the very ship they're aboard. He hadn't revealed his last name for a reason – people tend to treat him differently once they know he's second in line to inherit the Evans fortune. He flushes in embarrassment at having been caught lying by omission. "Yeah," he mutters, unable to look at the woman beside him. "I'm Soul. Nice to meet you too."

But the major doesn't seem to notice; at least, she doesn't say anything as she reaches across the narrow aisle in the pod to shake the man's hand. "Likewise, Mr. Kidd. You and your father are the only reason I'm sitting here today." She winces. "Not that – I mean, I suppose that's true in a couple ways, but I didn't mean –"

As the composed Major Albarn loses her cool, Soul once again remembers that the young woman beside him is still only eighteen. She seems so much older – older than himself, even – and so it's easy to forget she isn't. A part of him is relieved that she's flustered at something other than the accidental reveal of his identity.

He begins to realize where he knows this man from. The man seated before them is Mortimer Kidd, Jr., heir to Shinigami Enterprises. His face has been all over the holos for years, as he and his father run the company that designs and builds the tech for the military. Shinigami Enterprises' odd skull brand gleams on everything from subaquatic vessels to atmospheric fighter jets to interplanetary spacecraft.

It also grins off the side of the _Shibusen_ , and occasionally off the maintenance panels inside. The _Shibusen_ was to be Shinigami Enterprises' magnum opus – their first foray into intergalactic luxury liners. When the news holos weren't reporting on the young hero Albarn, or on himself for that matter, they had been lauding Shinigami Enterprises for being pioneers in a new era of space travel.

Shinigami Enterprises may have gotten Major Albarn out of many a scrape planetside in her campaigns, but it had also landed her here, in this escape pod. Soul finds a sick sense of satisfaction in the fact that if he doesn't survive, one of the men who got him into this mess won't survive either.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kidd waves off the major's struggling. "It's fine," he says. "It _is_ a bit ironic, is it not?"

She smiles awkwardly, her relief palpable. "Just a little bit," she says sheepishly, trying to hide her embarrassment.

Without warning, the _Shibusen_ gives her most massive convulsion yet. The harness straps dig into Soul's shoulders as he's thrown forward and upward, then slammed back down into his seat. His mouth is flooded with the taste of copper. Across from him, Elizabeth shrieks in fear. Patty shrieks in delight. The ringing in his ears can't drown out the screams of those still in the corridor outside.

And then the lights go dark.


	5. Chapter 5

**MAKA**

Beside her, Soul yelps.

It's only years of training that keep her from doing the same. The emergency lights in the pod had been dim, sure, but she realizes now how much they helped. Now that they're gone, the already dire situation feels even bleaker. A part of her wants to grab Soul's hand just for the reassurance of having another person next to her.

She doesn't, though. Maka's the one who's supposed to know what she's doing. The great 'Major Albarn' can't lose her cool – she's supposed to be perfect.

Infallible.

But it's all fake; she's surprised the others haven't figured that out yet. Ever since she fell off the catwalk, everything has gone toes up to the daisies. She feels bad for being so brusque with Soul earlier, but it's all she could do with her nerves frazzled the way they are. She hopes he'll forgive her even as she kicks herself for not realizing sooner where she had seen his face before.

 _Evans_. She thought he'd looked like more than the average socialite when she first saw him at the party. Now she knows why, but hardly has any time to think about it. She has more pressing concerns at the moment.

Like the fact that the man sitting in front of her is the reason she's in this position. A very important man, in front of whom she has just embarrassed herself terribly. She is thankful in part for the blackness of the pod – at least no one can see her lingering mortification, especially Evans. _Soul_ , she reminds herself. _He's still Soul._

But a new sense of anxiety is taking over. When she looks out the tiny viewport at the end of the pod, she sees not the bright ribbons of light, but individual pinpoints littering the void of space. All thoughts of powerful socialites immediately vanish within seconds.

"We've fallen out of hyperspace," she breathes in horror. Her words are startlingly loud. The white noise of the engines and the filtration systems has gone dead, leaving them all in the most oppressive silence that Maka has ever known.

No one speaks for several seconds, their breathing the only sound in the darkness. Then Maka curses, fumbling with the straps of her harness. "Shit!"

"What's wrong?" the question comes as a chorus from both Soul and Blake.

"None of the life support systems are live," she says. "We're gonna run out of oxygen long before anyone finds us –"

"No, stop!" Elizabeth cuts her off. "There could be another surge."

The words hit her like a slap to the face. Very slowly, she stops struggling with her harness. Maka's not an expert in interdimensional travel, but she knows that there are very large amounts of power involved. If any of them had been standing on the metal grating just moments ago ... she doesn't want to think about it.

It's a relief when the emergency lights flare back to life. The seven occupants of the pod sigh collectively, but still something's not right.

"Kidd, the numbers aren't flashing anymore," Patty whines.

Maka glances over, and sure enough, she's right. The countdown timer is no longer counting down. Maka prays to every deity she doesn't believe in that the actual countdown mechanism is still working, but she knows the likelihood of that is slim to none.

The ear-shattering scream of metal splits the silence in two. Maka's heart races as she realizes the implications – they're still attached to the _Shibusen._ Another surge like the previous one could be fatal. Staying attached to the _Shibusen_ would be fatal. She knows that they need to hotwire the pod – they need to eject it manually – but it pains her to admit that she has no idea how.

But she doesn't have to – not when the man who practically owns the company that built the ship is sitting right across from her. She looks him dead in his strange gold eyes. "Can you hotwire the pod?" she asks levelly.

He stares back at her for a moment. "I can't," he says finally, and Maka wants to scream. "But Liz can."

"Yeah! Go sissy!"

Maka looks over to where Elizabeth is already unbuckling her harness with frantic, fumbling movements. She drops to the floor, still clad in her elegant red ballgown, and kicks her shoes off. She stalks over to the control panel and removes the cover, looking at the mess of wires for only a moment before shoving her hands in elbow-deep. Maka watches as her face furrows in concentration before she pulls two wires out of the tangle.

She studies them for a moment and then nods. Biting her lip, the other woman then strips the ends with her fingernails. "I don't know what exactly this is gonna do," she announces, "so hold on tight."

When she touches the two stripped ends together, the rockets ignite, sending the escape pod careening away from the _Shibusen_. Maka tenses, gritting her teeth against the g-force of the sudden acceleration. Beside her, Soul's reflexes are not so quick, and his head slams into her shoulder before he can stop it.

But her shoulder is softer than the hull of the escape pod, which is what Elizabeth's head slams against in the aftermath of the acceleration.

"Sissy!"

"Liz!"

She's out cold, and something needs to be done immediately. They're already moving out of the artificial gravity field generated by the _Shibusen_ , so it's easy for Maka to unclip her harness and push towards the woman. Knowing the gravity will soon be gone completely, she slides her foot through one of the grab straps on the floor.

She ignores Soul's gasp of shock.

It doesn't take long for her to lift the other woman up and back into her seat. Mr. Kidd takes over from there, strapping her back into the harness. Maka secures Elizabeth's feet in the plastene clips, then reminds everyone else in the pod to do the same. The strain of keeping a limb from floating away in zero-g is no fun.

Blake, of course, shoves his feet into the clips a little too enthusiastically. One of them breaks off, leaving him to struggle with an unrestrained leg.

Maka quickly straps herself back into her own restraints, thankful for the fact she already stowed her scythe and grab bag in one of the storage bins. The pod is wobbling, but not spinning, for which she's thankful. She's not one to get spacesick, but with all the socialites in the pod who have probably never experienced a rough flight in their lives …

Well, it's a good thing the pod isn't spinning.

They shoot away from the ship, and Maka feels her stomach swoop as the last vestiges of artificial gravity disappear. Unable to stop herself, she looks back through the viewport at the end of the pod.

She gasps. The _Shibusen_ is rolling, spinning lazily along her latitudinal axis when she has absolutely no reason to be doing so. Despite all that she's seen in the field, Maka swallows hard as she unwittingly imagines all the people who were unable to make it to their escape pods. In her mind's eye she sees them tossed around, like the balls in the cages she's seen on old holos.

Her memory supplies the word. _Lottery_. Luck. Just as it's luck that she's one of the few that made it out before things went quite literally sideways.

She shudders viciously at the thought of the unlucky souls falling off the side of the catwalk, unable to catch themselves as she had. They must be falling, their fragile mortal bodies crushing against the plastene and metal infrastructure of the ever more durable _Shibusen_ , only to be thrown once again as the ship continues to roll...

Maka doesn't realize she's closed her eyes until a warmth against her hand causes her to open them. Soul is looking at her with concern from the next seat over, those sanguine eyes deep and understanding but also the same color as the blood she imagines is being spilled inside the ship. She shrugs him off and looks away.

Nobody speaks as they all try to wrap their minds around what has just happened. Gazes dart back and forth between each other, each one questioning; each one asking, 'What now?'

A soft moan breaks the silence, and Mr. Kidd turns immediately to the woman seated beside him. "Elizabeth?" he asks. "Liz, talk to me."

"Shaddup," comes the reply. "My head hurts."

"Sissy's fine," Patty decides. "Stop worrying, 'Cuz."

"Stop _worrying?_ " Mr. Kidd asks incredulously, "We're floating in an escape pod away from the ruins of the supposedly 'perfectly safe' spaceliner that my father's company – _and my company, too_ – designed and built! Stocks are going to plummet, I'm stuck with strangers, and my cousin just knocked herself unconscious! I think I have every reason to worry!" He's shouting by the end of his impromptu speech, and his agitation is contagious.

" _You're_ worried?" Blake asks, "I –"

He gets to finish his sentence. A tremor ripples through the pod, a vibration that runs up through Maka's feet. The metal infrastructure begins to hum as the vibrations increase, and Maka glances out through the viewport once more. No longer does she see the ship, nor does she see the empty star field of space. There's a bright glow that obscures her vision, a glow that attracts the attention of everyone else in the pod as well.

Then, due to some internal reading, a heavy protective shield comes down and plunges them into emergency-lit darkness once more.

Maka knows that glow. The light, combined with the tremors, lead her to only one conclusion. They're in atmosphere. There's a _planet_ down below, and its gravity well is pulling them in. She swallows hard.

"Make that _crashing_ in an escape pod," she says, a poor attempt at humor in this dire situation. Nobody laughs. As she takes a deep breath of recycled air to center herself, it's Tsubaki who begins barking out instructions to those not well versed in crash-landing protocol. It's hard to hear her, as the humming becomes a roar as they rip through the atmosphere.

"Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth," she screams. "Relax your jaw. You don't want to break your teeth or bite your tongue!"

Maka thanks the deity she doesn't believe in that while she's stuck in a pod full of socialites, she isn't stuck in a pod full of idiots. Everyone around her nods in understanding. She forces herself to relax; to ignore the knot of anxiety and dread tying up her insides. It's just as hard as one might expect, given the circumstances.

They're well within the pull of the planet's gravity now, but the straps of her harness dig into her shoulders as she's suspended by their acceleration toward the surface. Distantly, she recognizes the fact that Blake and Liz are screaming, while Patty – oddly – is laughing.

She has only a moment to acknowledge the fact that Soul doesn't make a sound before an impact causes her head to snap backwards and her teeth to clash together. The parachute's deployed, and now they're floating.

At least, floating as much as they can be while still falling to their potential deaths.

"Well," Blake says cockily, as if he hadn't been screaming his head off mere seconds ago. "That wasn't too bad."

Tsubaki has no time to warn him before the second impact. A deafening crash echoes throughout the pod. All is still for but a moment, and then there's a scrabbling somewhere along the outside fuselage. The pod jerks, and Maka has only the time to curse violently before they're tumbling end over end.

It's not long before she can no longer tell which way is up and which way is down. She gives up trying, and concentrates on the feeling of the harness digging into her flesh as she's flung first forward, then backward, up, down, and in every way imaginable. She groans softly as the pod finally rolls to a stop.

"Soundoff," she mutters groggily, forgetting that she's not with her platoon but with a crowd of socialites who are currently so far out of their league they're out in space – except they're not, and that's the problem. It's Tsubaki who picks up the call.

"First Lieutenant Tsubaki Nakatsukasa, present and accounted for."

The others follow after in crude mockery of the military fashion.

"Uhm, Blake Barrett. Alive, but _damn_ do I hurt."

"Mortimer Kidd, Jr., present."

"Patricia Thompson, but just call me Patty! I'm here!"

"Elizabeth Thompson, present – at least, physically."

"Soul … Evans," Soul says resignedly. "Not dead."

Maka sighs in relief. Everyone's still alive, though in varying states of disarray and injury. She herself is going to have bruises for weeks, and her shoulders still hurt, but they're not the worst injuries she's ever had. "Okay," she sighs. "We're right-side up, at least. _Don't_ everybody unbuckle your harnesses at once – it'll be no good if this thing shifts and we all go flying." She's gradually regaining her sense of authority, and it shows. Slowly, everyone turns to look at her.

"I'll go first."

She has to stay calm. For these people, she's the one who knows what she's doing, even if she is just flying by the seat of her neon-green-drink-stained pants. This ragtag group of socialites and her one fellow soldier is her platoon now, and she'll see them through this safely. She doesn't want to think about the second scenario.

The one where she dies trying.


	6. Chapter 6

**SOUL**

There have been very few times in his life that Soul has been grateful for his unnaturally white hair. He can count them on one hand – one finger actually, and that time is now.

If his hair weren't already white, he thinks, it certainly would be by now. It would match the rest of him – he's not sure how one can actually _feel_ white, but he does. The blood has drained from his face. His skin is cold and clammy. His knuckles are white from gripping the straps of his harness.

He feels like he's going to throw up. Breathing slowly and evenly so as to prolong the inevitable, he watches as Major Albarn tentatively undoes her own straps and slides to the floor rather ungracefully. There's a slight _clang_ as her boots hit the metal floor, but the pod doesn't move. She sighs in relief.

"Okay," she says. "Okay." A soft pinging echoes as the fuselage of the pod cools, and it fills the heavy silence. "First things first. Unbuckle your harnesses – help the person next to you if they're struggling. We need to find the readout of this planet's atmosphere before we can step outside ..."

"Nothing will have survived the crash," Elizabeth says, getting to her feet tenderly as Mr. Kidd supports her elbow. "But I can tell you that the air out there is just fine."

"How do you know?" the major asks sharply. Soul chooses this moment to take a shot at standing. Thankfully, his dignity remains intact as his legs agree to hold his weight.

"We ain't dead yet," the other woman shrugs, pointing behind the major. Major Albarn whirls around, and Soul cranes his neck to see what it is they're looking at. When she gasps, he knows the reason why. There's a giant rip down the hull of the pod, exposing them to whatever might be out there.

"There's grass," she muses, her eyes falling upon the green, "and trees. This is good – at least we've landed on a planet that supports life."

"So we can go?" Blake asks eagerly.

"Yeah," she says absentmindedly, "but be –"

"Yahoo!"

"– careful," she finishes lamely as Blake slams the door open. She shakes her head as she turns to Soul. "I don't understand your friend," she says.

Soul laughs through his nausea. "I don't either," he admits.

Mr. Kidd and his cousins file past them, both Mr. Kidd and Patty acting as crutches for the still-not-quite-with-it Elizabeth. The woman smiles weakly at them as they pass. "I could do this on my own," she says. "I'm just choosing not to."

And then it's just the two of them in the pod, and Soul is painfully mindful of the truth that slipped out just before things had been shot to hell. He shifts awkwardly, unsure of her reaction. "Just like old times," he tries joking lamely. At least the major humors him with a laugh.

"'Old times' was just over an hour ago, Soul," she says as she takes her grab bag out of its storage compartment. "But I know what you mean." She turns to him and smiles, and even at this most inopportune moment he almost gets lost in her eyes once more. She still called him _Soul,_ he realizes, and his heart skips a beat rebelliously before the lurching in his stomach causes him to turn away.

"Excuse me," he mumbles. He makes a dash for the doorway and stumbles outside, hardly paying attention to his surroundings as his stomach empties onto the foreign green grass. When at last he looks up, the other five who disembarked before him are all looking away pointedly.

 _Goodbye, dignity._

He can see the tabloid headlines: Evans Son a Public Embarrassment! Too Much Alcohol Not Good for the Soul! They're always way too excited to catch any of the Evanses in compromising positions. It takes him a moment to remember the fact that they're in the middle of a field on some random-ass planet, and that there are no paparazzi following him.

It's Mr. Kidd who hands him a handkerchief, monogrammed in one corner. Soul is almost afraid to soil it, but the man insists.

"Thank you, sir," Soul says respectfully, just as he was taught. Mr. Kidd waves him off before he can say much else.

"That's not necessary," he says. "I'm not much older than you are, and out here, we're all equals. Please, just Kidd. Not Mortimer – I _hate_ it. Only my mother calls me Mortimer."

Somehow, Soul can tell that Kidd is trying to cheer him up, and he appreciates it. Yet, he feels there's some deeper meaning behind his words. _Out here, we're all equals._ The thought pleases him. "I would give this back," he says, "but you probably don't want it. I'll hold onto it until I can get it cleaned."

Kidd grins wearily. "Sounds good to me."

Neither of them calls attention to the fact that it may never be truly clean again.

Maka steps out of the wreckage of the escape pod, and the clang of her boots against the metal draws their attention. She pauses at the entrance, squinting into the daylight after so long in the infinite darkness of space and the artificial light of the _Shibusen_. Stray hairs escape her once-immaculate ponytail. She has her scythe slung across her back and her bag in her hand as she surveys the area.

The sunlight shines down upon her, and suddenly she's their guardian angel. Soul feels a twinge in his chest at the thought; he knows he would not have survived the wreck if it had not been for her. His admiration grows tenfold, and he bites his lip to stamp it back down. Now is not the time.

"What now, Captain?" Blake asks jovially, despite the fact his face is still as white as a sheet. The major sighs heavily as she steps away from the wrecked pod.

"There were some emergency ration bars in the bins," she says, ignoring the – accidental, this time – slight against her rank. "They aren't the tastiest things in the galaxy, but they'll keep us from dying. I thought maybe we should scout the area … get a feel for our surroundings …"

She trails off as she looks between the wearied faces, his included. She's not giving orders like she has been. In fact, she sounds almost unsure of herself for the first time since this whole debacle began. It's weird.

"Perhaps we should just make camp for now, Maka," Tsubaki suggests gently. "I think we all need a little bit of time to recover and regain our bearings."

"Yeah," the major says, "all right." She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders, and when she speaks again, her conviction is much stronger than before. "Okay. Here's what we're gonna do. We can't stay out in the open here much longer; I don't know how cold it's going to get once the sun goes down, or even when the sun is going to go down, but we need to find some sort of shelter. There's a copse of trees over that way," she says, pointing off to the side, "so we're going to make our way over there and set up camp. Does anyone here know how to make a campfire?"

She raises her own hand, as does Tsubaki. To Soul's surprise, both Elizabeth and Patty do as well. He had thought them to have been born elite and raised much like himself, Blake, and Kidd, but now he second-guesses himself.

"Okay, good." Maka says, interrupting his thoughts. "Tsubaki, there are some more supplies in the pod that I couldn't grab – can you get them for me?"

"Yes, sir!" Tsubaki replies, and jumps to it. Both act as if it's completely normal to call the female officer 'sir,' and so Soul keeps his mouth shut despite his questions.

"Elizabeth," the major then says gently, "how are you feeling? Can you make it to the tree line?"

The woman scoffs from where she's perched on a conveniently positioned rock. "I'm fine," she says, adjusting her skirts. "Really, I am. But please, call me Liz. I've always thought 'Elizabeth' was a bit too stuffy."

"All right," Maka says. "Liz."

They stand in silence until Tsubaki reemerges from the downed pod, clutching what look like large sheets of foil and some canteens. "This is all of it," she says.

Maka nods. "Okay," she says, "let's move."

The trek through waist-high grass and uneven terrain is the worst thing that Soul has ever done in his life. It wins out over all the soirées and matchmaking his mother ever put him through. Sweat runs down his face and back in rivulets, soaking his pinstriped suit. Both his hair and shirt are sticking to his skin, and no amount of tugging at either remedies the situation. Looking around, he sees that nobody else is having fun, either. _Blake is lucky_ , he thinks. _He wasn't wearing a suit jacket when everything went down_. Soul is tempted to take off his own suit jacket, but the major is taking up the rear, and he doubts she wants to see his disgustingly sweat-stained shirt.

Never mind the fact that she's definitely seen worse. _He_ doesn't want her to see his disgustingly sweat-stained shirt.

Which is quite ridiculous. After all, she spends most of her time amongst fellow soldiers, most of whom are men. Most of whom are usually sweaty. She probably doesn't care one way or the other, but he cares.

He shouldn't care, but he does.

"Uhg, when is this walk going to _end?_ " Liz complains. She's taken off the deathtraps she calls shoes, instead carrying them in one of her hands the way women do. She doesn't even flinch at walking barefoot across the unfamiliar terrain. There are rips in her nylons, but she doesn't seem to care.

"It looked so much closer from the pod," her sister says, peering forward though pretend binoculars. "Come on, Sissy. It can't be much farther now!"

Oh, how wrong she was.

It takes them at least half an hour to finally reach the copse of trees, and they're all exhausted. Even the major and Tsubaki look to be worse for wear. Blake collapses against one of the large trunks with a loud groan. "How dare you make us walk so far?" he accuses the major halfheartedly.

Kidd takes a seat as well, as does everyone else in their ragtag group of survivors. Soul follows their lead, until at last it's just the major who's still standing. Moments later she allows herself sink to the ground as well.

"Sorry," she says, "but it wouldn't have done us any good to hang around the pod."

"The escape pods were all outfitted with communications equipment," Kidd replies. "I assume that's out? I sincerely doubt you forgot about it."

Maka huffs a laugh. "Yeah, that's down. If the surge didn't take it out, being ripped clean off certainly did."

Everyone falls silent. It's a humbling realization, the fact that they might very well be entirely on their own without any means of communication. "Is there any way to salvage any of it?" Soul finds himself asking.

Kidd looks at him. "We could probably find bits and pieces," he says, "but what anything we found would be useless without the other working parts."

"Oh, right."

Maka looks pensive. "It might work," she says. "If we can find other pods with downed communications, we might be able to find the other bits and pieces we need …" she shrugs, and then smiles at him. "It's worth a shot, at least."

Soul forces himself to look away before he does something like make a fool of himself, but in the process he accidentally meets Blake's eyes. His friend waggles his ridiculously blue eyebrows and looks pointedly in the major's direction. He can't help it; he blushes furiously, and Blake gives him a thumbs up. That doesn't help the problem any, and he stares down at his shoes.

"Well then," Maka says, standing. "We should probably collect firewood now that we've had a chance to recover. I don't know when night is gonna fall, but by the looks of things it isn't too far off. We should be prepared."

"You want to build a _fire_?" Blake moans, "In _this_ heat? I doubt it's going to get cold tonight."

"You never know," she says calmly. "And even if it's still this hot when the sun goes down, the cold isn't the only danger that could be out there. We don't know what sort of wildlife lives here, if any, but a fire should be enough to scare anything away."

"And what if it isn't?" Liz asks fearfully. Patty answers the question before Maka has a chance.

"DINNERTIME!"


	7. Chapter 7

**MAKA**

Maka forces herself to take deep breaths. Night has fallen, it's gotten much colder than any of them anticipated, and everyone's still alive. Everyone's still alive.

Everyone's still alive.

And they need her to help them stay that way.

Maka continually reminds herself of that fact as her eyes scan the motley crew this tragedy has flung together. Two highbred socialites (Soul is an _Evans_!), a powerful CEO, two society girls to whom there is more than what meets the eye, and two soldiers including herself. For all that she hates the rich and frivolous, these aren't the worst people she could have been shipwrecked with. She can imagine a number of her fellow soldiers who would be worse.

Staring into the fire that the others had started, she can't stop her thoughts from turning over and over again in her head. The flames dance, searing into her brain the images of the past hours that she would much rather forget: the crash; the _Shibusen_ rolling onto her side; the people left stranded on the ship; the horror on Soul's face as she dangled above death; Soul himself.

In the embers of the fire she sees the red of his eyes, even though the two are hardly the same color at all. He's an _Evans_. She realizes now where she recognized him from. He's only a member of one of _the_ most influential families in the galaxy. His parents are both prominent politicians; his brother is renowned across the galaxy for his skill with a violin. She should have realized it sooner. How many people in the galaxy are named Soul, with characteristic red eyes and white hair?

His brother has the same odd coloring, she's heard. No one knows why. In the rumor mill that is the army barracks, she's heard everything from genetic anomaly to body modification to aliens. Somehow, she doubts Soul is an alien.

She just feels so _stupid._

Maka shivers in the unnatural chill of the night, tugging the jacket of her dress uniform closer to her body. She's going to have to pay for a new one anyway – there's no way around it at this point, and she cringes at the thought of the expense. Perhaps she can convince her commanding officer that it's technically _his_ fault that her uniform is ruined; after all, he was the one who ordered her on the stupid press tour.

A second body sits down beside her, and she jumps. When she turns, the red coals are replaced by red eyes that gleam almost menacingly in the light of the dancing flames. She forces a smile at him as she says, "Hey."

"Hi. Uhm, is it all right if I sit here?"

Maka barely keeps herself from shaking her head in disbelief. He's an _Evans_ , and he's asking permission from _her_? But she holds her tongue. "Yeah, of course." She pauses. Should she attempt some sort of a joke? "You're kind of already here, anyway."

Soul cracks a lopsided grin. "Yeah," he says, "I guess I am."

Maka studies him in silence. The confident socialite she met aboard the _Shibusen_ has all but disappeared, leaving behind a man as scared and vulnerable as she is. She wants to ask him how he's doing, how he's holding up, but he's an _Evans_ and she really shouldn't be talking to him in the first place. She has to remind herself that even though he was the one who talked to her first, if anything were to happen she would be the one to take the blame.

That's just how it works in high society.

"Do I have something on my face?" he asks, wiping at his cheek. The action itself leaves behind a streak of dirt, and Maka laughs. Fuck high society; there's no such thing here on this planet. She'll deal with the consequences when they return.

"You do now," she says. Soul groans and runs his fingers back through his hair before wiping at the spot again with the cuff of his suit. If the bond of the hair gel had been failing before, it has since broken completely. Chunks of hair break away from his head, creating a spiky, gravity-defying mess. The unnatural whiteness leaves a blank canvas which reflects the dancing yellows and oranges of the flames beautifully.

Maka has to look away. Reluctantly, she tears her eyes from him and glances at the others who sit around their makeshift camp. Blake and Tsubaki are cuddling together against a nearby tree, while Kidd and his cousins are immersed in deep conversation. It's almost … _peaceful_ , she realizes as she shivers. She cannot say how long it has been since the incident aboard the _Shibusen_ , but since then she has not gotten a bit of rest. As terrible as being stranded on this planet is, she almost enjoys it. She enjoys the feeling of being amongst friends, even if she's known all but one of them for only a few hours.

"Uhm, here," Soul says, drawing her attention back to him. He holds a folded silver sheet out to her, refusing to meet her gaze. "I know you're probably used to this and all, and that you've probably been through worse, but I uh … saw you shivering … and, well …"

Maka smiles at him as she takes the reflective thermal sheet. The things aren't soft, or even comfortable, but they do a bang-up job of preserving body heat. "Thanks, Soul," she says, cutting off his blundering.

"You're welcome, uhm, Major –"

She sighs. "Maka," she says, interrupting him once again. "Just call me Maka. I think we're all beyond formalities at this point, to be honest. Besides," she adds, "you're a fucking Evans, and I'm still calling you by _your_ first name."

Soul bites his lip and stares into the fire as she wraps the foil sheet around herself. "Being a 'fucking Evans' gets old too," he admits, and she immediately feels guilty. "Sorry I deceived you," he mutters, his voice small. "I just really liked actually talking to someone for once."

Maka's heart rebels in her chest, but she quickly forces it into compliance. _Someone_ , she forces herself to distinguish. It could have been _anyone_. Still, she smiles. "I can understand that," she says. "Since the campaign in Death City, I've kind of felt the same way. Everyone under me worships the ground I walk on, while the higher-ups scoff at me for being so young and for being a girl. You just can't win."

The man beside her barks a laugh. "I'm not the politician my parents are, but they want me to go into politics. I'm not the musician my brother is, but he's trying to get me to follow him into music. And then when I finally get away from all of them for a while, the spaceship I'm on wrecks. Story of my life."

The fire crackles, casting sparks across their makeshift campground as they both fall silent. Maka can see the stars above through the gaps in the tree cover, crisp and clear. They twinkle almost tauntingly, as if to say, "We're up here and you're not," but they soothe her all the same. She doesn't recognize any of the constellations, nor is it any star chart she's familiar with, but that's still the one thing that remains constant on all the planets she's toured through – there are always stars.

Soul follows her gaze. "Don't worry," he says, misreading her thoughts, "there's bound to be someone coming to get us. A ship as big as the _Shibusen_ doesn't just disappear."

 _I hope you're right_ , Maka thinks, but doesn't reply aloud. If he's taking comfort in the false promise of rescue, she won't be the one to burst his bubble. At least, not yet. She yawns loudly, and she can only imagine how the man beside her is feeling. "You should get some rest," she says. "It's going to be a long day tomorrow."

He laughs. "I would argue," he says, getting to his feet, "but I am very much inclined to agree with you. You're, uh, taking first watch then?"

Maka nods. "At risk of sounding arrogant, there's no one better to do so. I'll wake Tsubaki in a couple hours and turn in then." She pauses for a moment, then unwraps the thermal sheet from her shoulders and hands it back to him. She instantly misses the heat it provides. "Take this," she says. "It's much easier to sleep when you're not constantly shivering."

He hesitates. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely," she insists, although she _really_ wants it back. Her dress uniform may be a polyester/wool blend, but it's not designed for survival in temperatures such as these. "The cold will help me stay awake."

Soul gazes at her evenly for a moment longer. He looks as if he's about to say something, but he shakes his head and turns away as he yawns. "Goodnight, then," he says. "Get some sleep later, okay?"

"Yeah," she says, turning back to the flames. "Okay."

He wanders off, though not too far from the fire, and settles on the ground, wrapping the thermal sheet around himself so that he looks like a foil-wrapped burrito. Maka smiles at the sight, but pities him as he tosses and turns in an attempt to make himself comfortable. She doubts he's ever slept on anything harder than the softest mattress.

"Fucking rich kids," she whispers to herself as she shivers. Now that she's stopped, she feels all the aches and pains of the day. Worst of all is the constant throbbing that has settled in her shoulders, and she rolls them in an attempt to keep them loose. She _needs_ the use of her arms tomorrow. Dimly, she recognizes the other general injuries, but she's used to overworked muscles and massive bruises.

She doesn't know how much time passes. The flames dance before her, growing dimmer and dimmer. She's about to get up and find more firewood when a weight falls onto her shoulders. She looks up in shock, her hand flying to the scythe that remains at an arm's length away. When she recognizes who it is, she sighs and tries to recover her wits. "Dammit, Soul," she hisses, "you scared the hell out of me! Aren't you supposed to be sleeping?"

He shrugs. "Didn't want you to freeze to death," he mumbles. "Take that. The sheet is warm enough." He walks back to his makeshift cocoon before Maka even registers that the weight around her shoulders is his pinstriped suit jacket. She wants to insist that she's fine; that she doesn't need someone to look after her, thank you very much, but she finds herself pulling the jacket tighter around her diminutive frame. It _is_ warmer than the thin material of her uniform alone, and it still carries with it some of his body heat.

Briefly, she wonders how much the now-wrinkled, now-stained jacket cost. She decides she doesn't want to know.

"Right," she says to herself as she surveys the dying embers before her, "more firewood. Come on, Maka. Start moving."

Maka pushes herself to her feet, stiff after cold hours of sitting beside the fire. Once she's standing, she puts her arms through the sleeves of Soul's jacket and buttons it in front. She swims in the extra material, even with her uniform jacket providing extra bulk, and she's sort of glad that everyone else has fallen asleep at this point.

She whistles softly as she ventures further into the forest, careful to always keep within sight of the glow of the campfire. It's not hard to locate good firewood; everything is dry, and many of the branches are already broken. Maka gathers an armful, and then begins to make her way back toward camp.

A rustling in the trees stops her cold. She waits for a moment, and there it is again. It's the definite sound of a creature in the undergrowth, and she swallows nervously. Her arms are full of firewood, and her scythe is still sitting back at camp – she's virtually defenseless. _At least I know why the branches were already broken_ , she thinks, and suppresses a laugh at her own ignorance.

The trees rustle again, and Maka decides that it's no good standing in the middle of the forest – she's an easy target if whatever creature is out there is looking for a bite to eat. She cautiously begins to make her way back toward the camp and 'safety.'

As she moves, a harsh keening sounds from the direction of the rustling. _Keee-shiiiiin,_ it whines, _keeeee-shiiiiiiiin_. The sound sends shivers down Maka's spine, and she breaks into an all-out run, tumbling through the undergrowth with firewood in her arms and a uniform that was never meant to see so much activity. The creature sounds like it's getting closer, closer, closer...

Until at last she stumbles out into the small clearing in which they've made their camp. The fire is still burning, albeit dimly, and Maka rushes to dump some of the new wood into the flames. It catches quickly, and the fire roars to life once again. She piles the rest of it a few feet away before hurriedly grabbing her scythe and whipping it into a 'ready' position. She isn't going down without a fight, whatever this thing is.

But it never shows its face. One last _kee-shin_ hisses into the night; and then, with a rustle of the trees, it's gone, and the night is once more peaceful but for her frightened soul.

Maka doesn't sleep that night, and her scythe never again leaves her hand as she watches first the flames, then the stars. Somewhere among those wee hours before sunrise, the sky lights up.

She can only look on in horror as the _Shibusen_ breaks atmosphere, falling in a fiery, captivatingly deadly swan dive toward destiny.


	8. Chapter 8

**SOUL**

Sleeping on the hard, dirty ground with nothing more than a foil sheet as bedding is hands-down the worst thing that Soul has ever experienced. The wrecking of the _Shibusen_ had been exciting – adrenaline-inducing for all that it had been terrifying. The trek across the endless fields of the planet they found themselves marooned on could be seen as an adventure. But there is nothing adventurous nor adrenaline-inducing about waking up with a crick in his neck and a giant bruise down his side, courtesy of a minor earthquake in the night.

"Hey, Soul's awake!"

The rambunctious declaration can only have been made by his best friend, and Soul groans. "Yeah, yeah," he says, pushing himself into a sitting position. He slowly realizes that everyone else in their ragtag group of shipwreck survivors is awake, and he immediately feels guilty. "You should have woken me."

"Nah," Blake says, "Maka – that's the major – said we should let you sleep. Said you had a tough time falling asleep last night, which I don't blame ya for. The ground really isn't all that comfortable, and that earthquake last night – whew!"

"No, it's not," Soul agrees. "And yeah, I felt it." It had taken him what felt like hours to fall asleep in the first place – although it probably hadn't helped much that he got up to give Maka his jacket. He knew she had been through worse, but still the thought of her shivering by the fire while he had both the miracle-working thermal sheet and his coat hadn't sat well with him. He shouldn't have cared; as a true Evans, he wouldn't have, but then again, he had always been a little different from the rest of his family.

He forces himself to his feet as Blake continues, "Lucky for me, I had 'Baki by my side all night long. She's warm and soft, which kinda made up for the hard ground."

Soul looks to his friend sharply. "All night?" he asks. "Maka didn't wake her for her turn on watch?"

Blake shrugs. "If she did, I didn't notice, and she was back beside me before I woke up."

Red eyes drift across the camp to where the young women in question are discussing something in hushed voices. Soul can just barely make out Maka's face, but even from here he can tell that there are heavy dark circles under her eyes that hadn't been there the day before. _She didn't sleep_ , he realizes, and the thought bothers him more than it should.

"Come on, Soul," the man with the blue hair says. "Maka said she wanted to move out as soon as everyone was awake, and I don't think it's a good idea to keep her waiting!"

Blake is right, of course, though Soul doesn't tell him this. Instead, he reaches down to pick up the thermal sheet. As he does so, he finds that his jacket has been folded as neatly as possible and laid beside where he slept. Maka must have returned it to him when it began to warm up once again with the sunrise; it's already getting comfortably warm, and it's not like he had expected her to keep it.

After doing his business back in the woods – and it being the second time doesn't make it any easier, or any less disgusting – he meets up with Blake and the others at the end of their little camp. He sees that he's not the only one worse for wear; the dresses that both Liz and Patty wear are crumpled and covered in dirt. In Liz's case, there are spots of oil dotting the fabric from her desperate reach into the innards of the escape pod. It's Kidd, actually, who looks the cleanest of all of them.

"Sorry about that," Soul says, stifling a yawn. "You didn't have to let me sleep."

Maka shrugs. "We didn't wake anyone else up, so it wouldn't be fair to you if we did. Besides, we needed to clean up camp, anyway."

He still feels guilty, but her words assuage him a bit. A corner of his mouth turns up in a half-smile. "Okay," he says. "What now?"

"And what was with that 'quake last night?" Blake interjects.

" _Now_ ," Maka says, ignoring Blake as she looks over the group with those green eyes of hers, "we have to find a way home. As for the tremors, I … I saw …" she trails off, unable to speak the words. Several moments pass before she states, rather bluntly, "The _Shibusen_ crashed last night. Or rather, early this morning. We probably felt the shockwave from the impact. We need to look for survivors, or at the very least, salvage what we can of the wreck."

Her declaration is met by a chorus of shocked gasps, his own among them. The _Shibusen_ had crashed? Not just wallowed in space? He doesn't want to believe it, but he knows Maka isn't lying.

"That's impossible!" Liz exclaimed. "I worked on those blueprints myself – it was built to be unsinkable!"

Soul's eyebrows shoot up unconsciously. He had wondered about her knowledge of the control panel in the escape pod; hearing she's an engineer doesn't surprise him as much as it impresses him. He wishes he could do useful things like that.

"Well, it sank," Maka says frankly.

"It must have gotten caught in the gravity well of the planet," Kidd muses. "It was built in orbit – it was never designed to withstand more than the slightest bit of gravitation. I'd have the pilot fired, but I don't think it matters at this point …"

Everyone laughs grimly at the morbid humor as they pick up what few supplies they have and head back into the field they trekked through the day before. As soon as they're out of the relative shade of the tree cover, Soul starts to sweat once again. It's still early in the morning, and yet the sun is brutal. He rolls up the sleeves of his red dress shirt and, after a moment of deliberation, ties his already-wrinkled suit jacket around his waist in an undignified fashion.

It's not long before the others follow suit. Soul can tell that Maka wants to move faster, but they have to allow for Liz's and Patty's disadvantaged, barefooted and/or heeled state. Although they're more rested than when they took the hike the first time, it still takes them about half an hour to get back to the site of the downed pod.

There, they rest for a bit. Liz flops down rather ungracefully onto the rock she had claimed the day before and tosses her shoes away. "Maka," she calls, "do you have a knife in that bag of yours?"

"Hmm? Yeah," Maka says, eyeing the other woman for a moment before grabbing the knife out of the bag she had risked both Soul's life and her own for. "Here."

Liz takes it gratefully, then stabs it into the gold silken fabric at her knee. Kidd gasps, but she ignores him as she dutifully cuts away the bottom half of her skirts. When she finishes, she's left with a knee-length dress that won't hinder her nearly as much as the full-length dress had. She then goes about rendering the same treatment to Patty's blue dress.

There is no doubt about it: the Thompson sisters are unlike any Society girls that Soul's ever met before.

He only realizes he's been staring when Liz looks up and meets his eye. "We grew up on the streets," she says, answering his unspoken question. "Our parents died of the Sickness on Andel, and neither of us wanted to be shunted into the foster care system." She shrugs. "So we ran."

"Yes," Kidd muses, "thus making it impossible for Father to find you. That is, until you got arrested for thievery."

"A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do," Liz dismisses as she hands the knife back to Maka. "Right, Patty?"

"Right!"

Maka clears her throat. "I don't mean to be rude," she says, "but we really need to stay focused, here. We should get as much of the walking done as we can before noon. Judging by the temperature now, it's going to be hell later."

"Right," Liz says, suddenly businesslike. "Patty, let's go see what's useful on this hunk of scrap metal, shall we?"

"You got it, Sissy! Lead the way!"

As the two make for the wrecked pod, Soul senses Maka coming to stand beside him. Despite his best intentions, his pulse begins to race. _This is getting out of control,_ he thinks.

"You know," Maka says, "Just looking at them, I'd say they're almost _enjoying_ this, to an extent."

Soul glances at her out of the corner of his eye, her profile lit by the morning sun. "You heard what Liz said," he murmurs, amazed he's able to speak without tripping over his tongue. "They grew up on the streets, and now – being related to the Kidds – they're expected to be the perfect society girls. Society is hard enough on those fortunate enough to be born into it."

Maka looks at him then, green eyes blazing curiously. "Those like you?" she asks. When he doesn't respond right away, too stunned at her ability to read into his words, she sighs. "It's harder on the women, too," she says, turning away. "I've never been Society, but I can see it. It's no different than it is anywhere else – it's just more public."

She walks off then, leaving him floundering. Blake chooses that moment to approach him from behind, clapping a hand down onto his shoulder. Soul jumps nearly a foot, and his friend laughs. "You gotta do better than that, man. Look, Tsubaki could probably help –"

"No thanks," Soul says quickly, shrugging off the hand. "We're getting off this planet, and then I'll never see her again anyway. So what's the point?"

"The _point_ , my dear friend, is the here and now. Listen to your god and live a little, will ya?" He saunters off, leaving Soul once again stymied. Blake has joked about being a god before, but it's usually a jab about his self-claimed 'prowess in bed' or whatever. Never had he sounded so … _serious_ about it.

Soul shakes his head. It's just Blake being Blake, after all.

More worrisome is the fact he didn't deny it. He sneaks another glance at the green-eyed young woman who is now helping the Thompson sisters in lugging pieces of metal, machinery, and electronics. Some of her hair has fallen from her ponytail, the ashy strands sticking in the sheen of sweat on her face. He feels himself flush and he looks away before she can see him staring, because that's what he's doing. Staring.

"So these are the parts we have to work with?" Kidd asks, crouching down beside one of the small scrap heaps. He pokes around the pile for a bit, then sighs. "This really isn't much to go off of," he says. "There might be some individual working parts, but none of them will work together. I don't know if it's even worth taking them with us."

"Then we won't," Maka says firmly. "We don't need anything else weighing us down – not in this heat." She glances upward, and Soul's eyes follow her line of sight. The sun is directly overhead now, its rays beating down upon them. A nudge at his side brings his attention back down, and he finds Tsubaki standing at his side with one of the emergency water canteens.

"It tastes like metal," she says, "but it's water. You're going to need it."

Soul takes the canteen gratefully and winces as he takes a swig – it tastes even more like metal than it did last night. Still, Tsubaki's right. It's water, and he's going to need it. He doesn't complain as he hands it back too soon for his liking. He knows he could easily drain the entire thing, but he also knows that the others in their group need it as much as he.

His parents wouldn't care.

His brother _might_ , depending on what mood he was in.

"Right," Maka says. "We need to keep moving. I know it's rough, with the heat, but I'd much rather get out of the open before nightfall. It gets a lot colder out on the plains than it does in the woods."

Soul shivers at the thought of temperatures lower than the ones he experienced last night. Two minutes later, they're wandering away from the relative safety of the crashed escape pod and into the unknown.

Once again with Maka leading the way like the sort of guardian angel she is.


	9. Chapter 9

**MAKA**

They camp out the next night at the base of a crest. It isn't much shelter, but at least it's enough to break the wind. Tsubaki attempts to light a fire using a collection of grasses, but it never takes for very long. It's a cold, miserable night for everyone that night. Maka, in an uncharacteristic bout of weakness, finds herself wishing that she, too, had someone to cuddle up to – had someone to share body heat with like Blake and Tsubaki, Kidd and Liz and Patty. Her eyes light upon Soul, but she quickly pushes the notion from her head. _He's an Evans_ , she reminds herself.

So Maka pulls her second all-nighter in a row, despite Tsubaki relieving her halfway through the night. She simply cannot sleep, even though the thermal sheet certainly does its job. She realizes she should have told the others about the _kee-shin_ creature she encountered the night before, but at the same time, she doesn't want to worry them. In the light of day, she started to believe it had only been a figment of her imagination. To her relief, all is silent that night but for the susurrus of the tall grasses in the breeze and Blake's snoring.

The next morning begins slowly. Perhaps she should have appreciated that time more than she did, because when the group of seven finally reaches the crest of the hill, they're able to see what became of the _Shibusen_. Maka hears a gasp and, with no small sense of mortification, realizes it's hers. Her knees go weak, and she barely registers the hands around her upper arms lowering her safely to the ground.

"Maka," someone says, "Maka, are you okay?"

But all she can see is the destruction laid out before her. The debris goes on for miles, spread in all directions around the epicenter of the crash. She cannot see the ship herself, only a long skidmark in the distance where it slid across the ground, but pieces of the once-smooth hull of the _Shibusen_ are now cracked, shattered, and crumpled, strewn alongside gash in the earth, and all around … oh, _god_. "Those are escape pods," she whispers in horror, a work-roughened hand covering her mouth. "None of them … we're the only ones who …"

The events of the past two days catch up to her, as do the two sleepless nights, and she can no longer hold herself together. As she falls apart, she's dimly aware of a second presence by her side. Although the extra heat in the already warm morning is unpleasant, she leans into it, allowing its solidity to ground her once more.

"My ship!" Kidd cries, "My perfect, symmetrical ship! She's ruined!"

"Do you really think that matters much right now?" Liz asks impatiently. "Maka told us the ship went down yesterday morning – we all felt it, remember?"

"Kaboom!"

Maka sniffs and attempts to pull herself together. They're all relying on her, goddammit – she can't afford this weakness. It's not the first time she's been faced with mass casualty, and this time, it's not even her fault. As she comes around, she gradually realizes she's being held against ratty, grimy pinstripes. She tries to pull away, but Soul stops her.

"Are you okay?" he asks in a murmur, and she can feel his breath ghosting across the top of her head. She flushes and wrenches herself away.

"I will be," she says brusquely, hoping that the redness in her cheeks will be attributed to either her crying or the heat. She has no time for this shit – not now, not ever – and tells herself to cut it out. She needs to get them off this planet. She uses the cuff of her ruined uniform jacket to swipe at her tears angrily as she turns away in a perfectly executed about-face.

"What now, sir?" Tsubaki asks quietly. Maka takes a shuddering breath.

"This changes nothing," she says. "We knew the ship went down – we should have expected this. We need to find any survivors, and we need to salvage what we can."

She feels more than sees Soul step up beside her as he looks out over the wreck. "It's almost … beautiful," he says shakily. "I mean, in a really, _really_ morbid sense of things, you know?"

Maka nods. "When it came down last night, it was all I could do to stare at it. I just couldn't look away."

"I still can't look away."

When she glances over at him, she cannot determine whether she is grateful or disappointed that he's still staring forward at the ship graveyard before them. Major Albarn is extremely grateful; eighteen-year-old Maka is slightly disappointed. When he _does_ look down at her, however, she turns away as soon as his sanguine eyes meet hers.

She doesn't have time for this shit.

"Okay team," she says gently, though pitching her voice so that she'll be heard, "everyone grab what you can, and let's move out. We're not doing anyone any favors by lollygagging around here, that's for sure."

And thus begins another grueling hike through the unforgiving foreign sunlight. This hike is longer than any of the others they've taken, and the day is hotter. At last, Maka can take it no more and removes her navy uniform jacket entirely, awkwardly sliding it out from underneath the scythe holster on her back. She's had it unbuttoned for the past couple days, but has not wanted to break uniform protocol entirely. It's only when she feels as if she's about to pass out due to heat exhaustion that she removes it and shoves the sleeves of the dress shirt she wears underneath to her elbows.

"Kiiiiddd," Patty whines behind her, "my feet hurt!"

"I'm sorry, Patty," Kidd says, "I – I don't know what to do about that …"

Maka halts the group. They've been walking for a couple hours now – _she's_ not exhausted, but she's used to much longer treks across much harsher territory with her platoon. _I'm leading a group of socialites,_ she thinks as she takes a deep breath to calm herself.

"Okay," she says, "we'll take a quick break. Patty, let me see your feet."

As everyone else tramps down the grass around them to make a space to sit, the shorter Thompson gingerly picks her way toward Maka. Even from where she stands, Maka can see the damage done to the other girl's feet – they're bruised and even bloody in places.

"Why didn't you say anything?" She asks as she instructs the younger girl to take a seat. She then crouches down next to her in order to get a better look at her battered feet, laying her scythe and jacket beside her.

Patty shrugs. "I didn't wanna slow everyone down," she says. "Sissy's feet are ugly, too."

Maka wants to scream. She appreciates their desire to keep up with her and not to be a hindrance, but at the same time, who knew how long they would be stuck here? They needed to take care of themselves, too! Who knew what sort of nasty foreign bacteria there were on this planet?

She ignores the hypocrisy of her thoughts, as she's the one who hasn't slept for two nights straight now.

"Elizabeth Thompson!" she shouts over her shoulder, "Get your ass over here!" She doesn't check to see if Liz is actually coming or not before she's fishing in her grab bag for what limited first-aid supplies she had stocked it with. She pulls out some antiseptic wipes, some gauze bandages, and a length of wrap bandages usually used to support twisted ankles or temporarily set broken bones.

"This is going to sting a little bit," she tells Patty as she rips open one of the antiseptic wipes. She casts the packet aside and runs the disinfecting wipe over the worst of the cuts on the other girl's feet. Patty flinches, but giggles all the same.

"It's cold!" she says.

A shadow falls over them, and Maka looks up to see Liz. "I'm doing your feet afterward," she says. "You can't be out here with open wounds."

"Sorry, Maka," Liz says as she sits down beside her sister. "I didn't even think –"

"It's fine," Maka dismisses her as she covers the worst of the open wounds with the gauze and begins wrapping Patty's feet with the wrap bandages. "I get why you didn't say anything, and I can respect that. But out here, what happens to one of us affects all of us – you need to remember that."

"Yes, sir," Liz says, grinning sheepishly. "If I'd known we'd be trekking across a foreign planet, I would have worn better shoes to that party," she jokes.

Maka laughs. "There," she tells Patty. "It'll feel a little weird, but the bandages should protect your feet. We'll have to stop and rewrap them every once and a while – let me know if they're getting loose."

"Yes, sir!" Patty says enthusiastically, bouncing to her feet and saluting cheekily with the wrong hand. "Sissy's turn now!"

"If you don't mind," Liz says, "I can disinfect my own feet. If you could just wrap them for me, then that would be great."

"Sure," Maka says, handing over a new antiseptic wipe. Liz rips the packet open, and Maka takes the time to put both empty packets back into her bag. She doesn't want to leave any trace of their presence behind.

It doesn't take long to get Liz's feet wrapped up. Maka pushes herself to her own feet, wiping sweat from her brow before holding out a hand to help Liz up. The older girl takes it gratefully. "This feels much better," she says. "Thanks, Maka."

"No problem," Maka replies. She turns to the rest of the group, who have been waiting patiently. "Alright, break's over. I hope everyone got some water. We'll stop again in an hour or two." As everyone rises to their feet, groaning and protesting, Maka grabs her jacket and scythe from where she laid them on the ground beside her. When she sees that everyone's ready to go, they move on.

"Hey, Maka," Soul says, jogging up to trek beside her. She looks at him inquisitively.

"What's up?"

"I, uhm, well … you didn't get any water while we were stopped there," he explains haltingly. His pinstriped jacket is once again tied around his waist by the arms, and his hair is even more ruffled than it had been a few nights earlier. Even so, he still looks the very epitome of put-together. It takes her a moment to realize that he's trying to hand her one of the canteens of water.

"Oh," she says dumbly. "Yeah, thanks."

Maka takes a swig, but not much of one. They're going to have to seriously start rationing the water soon; the escape pod's emergency supply is the only supply they have. She's military – she's dealt with unpleasant situations like this before – but her companions, save for Tsubaki, have not. She's incredibly impressed with how well they've taken everything up until now, but she's not counting on their luck to hold out.

"How are you holding up?"

She glances over at Soul and sighs heavily. "I should be asking you that question," she says. "I've handled this shit before; I'll handle it again. How are _you_ doing?"

"Terribly," Soul answers frankly. "My suit is ruined, I'm sweaty and gross, my hair is more of a mess than it ever has been in my entire _life_ , and these shoes were not made for long hikes – I think I'm starting to blister. I'm constantly thirsty, and hungry, and those nutrition bars are glorified cardboard, but I'm also having fun, I think. Apart from Blake, this is the closest I've been to having friends since I officially joined Society."

The red in his cheeks darkens past 'sunburn,' and he looks away. "Sorry," he mumbles. "I didn't mean to go off like that."

"No," she says, "it's all right. It's better you get it off your chest." There's something about his words that makes something flutter in her own, but she does her best to ignore that. _Evans_ , that sensible part of her whispers. She glances over her shoulder at the gaggle of people that follow. Blake and Kidd are arguing over something silly, while Tsubaki, Liz, and Patty exchange hushed words – no doubt Tsubaki is telling them about some of the antics the enlisted men get into. She turns back to Soul. "If we all get off this planet alive, I'm sure you'll stay good friends with them," she says. "There are some things you just can't go through without being friends afterward."

"You said 'them,'" Soul says, "but what about you?"

Crap. She had hoped that he would overlook that. She shrugs non-committedly. "Tsubaki and I will probably be going back out on the front lines," she says. "After this dumb press tour is over, well, after the _next_ dumb press tour is over, I'll fade into obscurity. At least, I hope I will. I'm not cut out for life in the limelight."

"Oh."

His face falls so hard, and Maka immediately feels bad. This is a bad idea. This is a really bad idea. She's already in too deep, and she's just digging herself deeper. "But I mean," she amends, "we have to get off this planet first. Then we'll see how it goes from there."

A smile creeps back onto his face. "Of all the people to get shipwrecked with, I –" he cuts off, shaking his head. "Never mind."


	10. Chapter 10

**SOUL**

From the crest of the hill, the _Shibusen_ 's immense sizehad caused her to look a lot closer than she actually is. As they walk, Soul can't even see the trench she left behind – he simply trusts that Maka knows where she's going.

He's been doing that ever since he met her; following her blindly, that is. The situation they're in has necessitated it, but a part of him wonders if those green eyes of hers would have ensnared him just as easily and deeply if the ship had never wrecked. He tries his best to ignore the niggling voice in the back of his head that tells him he doesn't need to wonder. He _knows_.

Thoughts of Maka bring his words from earlier that afternoon rushing back to the forefront of his mind. _"Of all the people to get shipwrecked with, I –"_ What did he think he was going to say? _"I'm glad it was you"_? How lame is that? He groans as he rolls restlessly beneath the thermal sheet, his limbs tucked in as tight as possible in an effort to conserve body heat.

He still shivers as he thinks back to that evening aboard the _Shibusen_ , the one before everything went toes up to the daisies. It's not the first time his thoughts have turned in that direction. In his memory, everything is so clean and crisp and colorful. It's almost poetic, in a sense, though he's never been one for poetry. That's always been his brother's thing.

His brother … news of the _Shibusen_ 's crash will have reached all the major media outlets by now. Wes must be out of his mind with guilt, as it was he who convinced Soul to take the trip in the first place after his latest blowout with their parents.

 _But maybe it's better if they think you're dead_ , a voice in the back of his head tells him. _Your parents never liked you as much as Wes. Wes always pitied you. You were the problem child, and now you're no longer a problem_.

Soul wants to deny it. He wants to deny it with every fiber of his being, but he can't help but agree. There's an element of truth to the voice's words, one that makes it impossible to deny the facts. He twists again uneasily, only to shift when a stray rock digs into his hip. He's decided that he hates sleeping outdoors.

After a few more minutes of tossing and turning, he sits up and faces the facts. Sleep just isn't going to come to him right now, despite how much he needs it. Sighing heavily as he wraps his arms around himself to guard against the cold, he looks around the camp they threw together a couple hours earlier. They had stopped earlier than Maka would have liked, but the location was too good to pass up: barring trees, which provided shelter, the freshwater stream they stumbled across was the next best option.

They'd all been wary about drinking the water until Tsubaki had gently pointed out that they'd either die of a foreign disease carried in the water or they would die of dehydration, as the canteens they'd brought from the downed escape pod were nearly dry. It had eventually been Maka's call to "drink the damn water," as she put it. After all, it's practically an unspoken rule at this point that her word is law, even if she's the youngest among them.

Maka … goddammit, why did he have go and think about her again? She's sleeping closest to him, too, and Soul longs to pretend that it means something more than it does. What had started as a simple combination of attraction and fascination aboard the _Shibusen_ has morphed into a full-blown crush, strong enough that he's stopped denying it.

 _You're Soul Evans,_ the voice reminds him. _You're twenty years old, and one of those elite assholes she hates. She's eighteen, and a soldier at that. She didn't even_ want _you tagging along when everything went south. She told you to stay put, didn't she? You're the one who insisted_. _You didn't even give her a choice_.

Soul flops back down, hitting his head on the hard ground in the process. A curse hisses through his lips, followed by several more. It's pathetic, but all he wants to do is cry. All his life he's been punished for crying, with punishments ranging from no dinner to a slap across the face. But with no one from his family here, the only reason he has not to cry is to save face.

When he feels the first rivulets running down his cheeks, leaving in their wake frigid tracks in the cold night air, he gives up. It's all just too much. He's exhausted. He's stressed. He's sunburnt. His head hurts, and he can't find a comfortable spot on this godforsaken ground. It's the final straw.

 _Wimp. Crybaby. Blake hasn't even cried, and he's the childish one of the two of you. You're never going to get off the planet if you keep this up._

He thinks he's being quiet, stifling his sobs as best he can with his hands and the sleeves of his jacket, but then there's a hand on his arm. He expects it to be Tsubaki – after all, she's the one on guard tonight, allowing Maka a reprieve – but it's not. It's the very girl he has been trying and catastrophically failing to avoid thinking about all night.

In the dim light of the coals of the tiny fire they managed to get going earlier, she's searching his expression. For what, he doesn't know, but it makes him nervous. He cannot see the color of her eyes in the darkness, but he imagines them to be just as green as they are in the daylight. He forgets to wipe his tears away.

"I'm sorry," she says at last.

"What for?" he asks, his words uneven as his diaphragm still convulses. "It's not your fault that the _Shibusen_ crashed."

She shakes her head. "You're not soldiers," she whispers, "and I forget that. I've been pushing you all so hard these past few days –"

"And we'd all be dead without you." He interrupts her, his voice cracking. "Blake, Tsubaki, Kidd … Liz and Patty … well, no. We'd have been dead without Liz, honestly."

She laughs brokenly and looks down at her hands. He doesn't know what compels him to do it, but he takes her smaller, callused hands in his own larger, soft ones. She looks up at him with wide eyes, startled. He nearly drops her hands and apologizes, but she smiles at him.

"Thanks, Soul," she says, making no move to pull away. His heart leaps and begins dancing in double time. He's glad that it's dark, because it means she cannot see the blood rising to his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

A few moments pass before she clears her throat and begins to speak again. "You know, I –"

He never learns what it is she was about to say, because she breaks off suddenly, turning sharply to look off in the distance. "Maka, what …?"

She shushes him sharply. "Shh! Did you hear that?" she whispers. He hadn't, but he knows that if Maka says she did, she probably did. They're silent for a couple minutes, and then he hears it.

 _Keee-shin!_

The eerie, haunting sound sends shivers down his spine, and Maka tenses beside him. "Yeah, I heard it," he says. "What is it?"

"I don't know," Maka admits. "I heard it our first night here – I was out collecting firewood and this _thing_ chased me. It sounded like that. I haven't heard it since. I thought maybe we'd left it behind."

Soul wonders if Maka realizes she's moved closer to him. _She probably hasn't_ , he decides. A moment later, she scrambles to her feet, yanking her hands from his.

"Sorry," she apologizes quickly before hurrying over to speak with Tsubaki, who also heard the strange noise. They confer in hushed voices for several minutes, and Soul wishes he could hear what they're saying. He's wide awake now, and he knows sleep is not going to come any time soon. His hands still tingle from where they held hers, although maybe it's just the fact they're now entirely exposed to the chilly night air.

When Maka returns, she crouches to shuffle through her grab bag. In the dim light of the alien moon overhead, he watches as she pulls a standard-issue blaster from the sack. She turns it over carefully, inspecting it, and Soul realizes he's never seen her with a gun in her hands before. She deftly checks it to make sure it's in working order, unhindered by the dark as the clicks pieces out and back in again.

She tosses it to him. He barely catches it in time to keep it from hitting the ground, and then he can only stare at it. He knows how to use one – both he and Wes do. Their parents made sure of that. But he's never held one outside of the range. He's never been in a situation in which he might have to use one for real.

Man, this night has been a rollercoaster ride of emotions.

"You think it's dangerous?" he finally manages to croak.

Maka regards him levelly. "We don't know," she says, "but it's best to be prepared."

 _Keeee-shin!_

Soul shudders. "Right," he says, squinting to check the safety on the blaster he now holds. _Maka's_ blaster. "Are you sure you don't need this?" he asks.

"I've got my scythe," Maka says simply. She pauses before explaining, "I had an exception made for me after it was all I had to fight with in one of my first campaigns. I kept the blaster I was issued, though. It's good to have a backup." She sighs heavily. "You should get _some_ sleep, at least. Keep the blaster where you can reach it in a hurry, though."

He doubts that he'll be able to sleep at all this night, but he nods anyway. "Thanks, Maka," he says, and he curses the vulnerability in the words.

"No, Soul," she replies softly. "Thank _you_."

For that, he has no response. The voice in his head wonders just what the hell she could be thanking him for. _All you've been throughout this ordeal is a burden_ , it says. _A burden, burden, burden …_

He doesn't remember falling asleep, but what feels like moments later, he's opening his eyes to rays of early morning light. His back is bruised from various rocks, and it hurts to touch where he unwittingly bashed his head the night before. He looks over, and for once, he's awake before Maka. In fact, he's awake before everyone, save for Tsubaki. He watches the dark-haired girl for a minute, then makes a decision.

Resisting the urge to groan, he sits up and grabs the blaster – _Maka's_ blaster – from where it lays beside him. Gritting his teeth against the now-constant aches, he gingerly picks his way over to where Tsubaki sits on watch. She looks up at him as he approaches, evidently startled by his presence.

"What are you doing up so early?" Tsubaki asks. "I know you got to sleep late last night."

Soul shrugs. "Dunno," he says, relishing in the use of improper grammar. He can do that out here. "But I'm awake, and you haven't slept … I thought maybe I could take watch if you wanted to get a quick nap in."

"That's sweet of you," Tsubaki says. "I may actually take you up on that. I'd say we probably have another hour before we actually need to get moving." She pauses. "I see Maka gave you her blaster."

"Oh, this. Yeah, she did," he says. "I mean, I know how to use it. My parents thought that all young men should know how to shoot a blaster, so both my brother and I learned pretty early on …"

"It seems we'll be in capable hands then," she says as she stands, brushing off her torn and filthy combat fatigues. "If you were Blake, I wouldn't trust you for even a second. I love him, but …"

"But he's Blake," Soul supplies when she trails off. She laughs.

"I'll see you again shortly," Tsubaki says as she begins to wander toward where Blake set up his thermal sheet. "More walking today!"

"Yaay," Soul replies with as much enthusiasm as he can muster. It's not a lot.

And then he's alone with his thoughts once more, something that he had forgotten to take into consideration when he made his offer. The voice is more insistent than it was in the night, and Soul has a hard time ignoring it as it continues to yammer his most negative thoughts and feelings at him.

 _But I'm keeping watch_ , he thinks back at it. _So there. Not entirely a burden._

It just laughs.


	11. Chapter 11

**MAKA**

They walk for two more days. Maka has lost track of how many days have passed since they've been on this godforsaken planet. She knows that she's sunburnt, and her once-crisp dress uniform has been torn and muddied and bloodied. Her medals have been stowed safely in her bag. Only the bone-numbing chill of the evenings keeps her from discarding her heavy navy blue jacket altogether – that and the sense of military propriety that remains rooted within her.

The howls of the _kee-shin_ creatures – whom the group simply dub 'kishin' – grow more and more frequent. They're worse at night, and Maka makes the decision to put a second person on every watch. Everyone finds it hard to sleep with the haunting, bone-chilling cries echoing every few minutes.

On the second day, they come across the first of the _Shibusen_ 's wreckage. The gouge that the ship left in the ground is massive, even more so than it had appeared from the top of that crest so many days ago. It's a macabre thought, the fact that they're walking in the remains of a crash that killed so many people, but they're a resilient group.

"YAHOO!" Blake exclaims as they step into large strip of dirt, "No more grass! No more grass!"

Patty giggles and joins in the chant. "No more grass! No more grass!"

Maka watches them wearily, a deep exhaustion settling in her bones as she realizes they must be getting close. She looks over to see Soul beside her, and he too has the sunken cheeks and dark circles under his eyes that she imagines are prominent on her own face. They all do. The emergency rations stashed in the pod had only been meant to last a week at most, and she thinks it's been about that. She tries to count the days in her head, but her sleep-deprived, malnutritioned brain won't cooperate with her. They've been rationing even more, and with the number of calories they burn walking each day, none of them are getting nearly enough to eat or drink.

She sighs as she feels a larger hand clasp her own. Ever since the night she nearly poured her heart out to him in the light of the dying embers of the fire, they've grown closer, both emotionally and physically. She isn't entirely sure how to feel about the new development, but she finds comfort in the casual touches they exchange, and so she lets it happen. She'd be lying if she said her heart didn't leap with each and every one.

But she knows now is not the time nor place for such a thing, and that they'll likely go their separate ways once they're off-planet. It's not just him, either; she'd be naïve to think that the bonds formed between these seven radically different people will last once they're all carefully ensconced back in their own lives once again.

For now, though, she simply squeezes Soul's hand in return.

"All right, guys, settle down," she says, letting go as she steps forward. "We're almost there, but we don't know how far the _Shibusen_ skidded, so we could still have a few days to go yet." She pauses. "If … we come across any escape pods … we need to salvage what we can. We're almost out of food, and we're low on water, too. I know it's gross …"

"We'll do it," Liz says, slinging her arm around her sister. "It's not all that different from what we did on Andel, right, Sis?"

Patty shakes her head. "Nope!"

Of all of them, Liz and Patty look the most out of place in their torn and dirtied ballgowns with wrap bandages around their feet. Maka sighs heavily. "Thank you, Liz, Patty."

The days of endless walking through scorching heat and fields of waist-high grass have taken their toll on everybody – not just physically, but mentally too. It was yesterday that Blake had proclaimed himself 'The Great God Black Star' and had asked everyone to address him as such. Tsubaki humored him for an hour before it got old. Meanwhile, Kidd obsesses more and more over the symmetry of nature – or lack thereof – as his nerves are frazzled by the lack of civilization.

Maka's impressed by – and thankful for – the fact that Soul has shown no signs of such madness. She knows that she should be relying on Tsubaki, her fellow soldier, as her rock through all this, but somehow that role has fallen to the white-haired socialite who stands slightly behind her.

 _He did save my life_ , she reasons. She has not forgotten that incident on the catwalk. If not for him, she would be but a splatter against the inner hull of the ship. She would like to think that Tsubaki would have been able to get the rest of them out alive, but a feeling tells her that probably wouldn't have been the case.

So really, they all owe their lives to Soul. She wishes she had something to give to him in thanks, but what could she possibly give him that he doesn't already have?

These thoughts consume her as they trek through the valley gouged by the fallen _Shibusen_.

So distracted is she at first that she doesn't register the keening howls of the Kishin that have grown so commonplace over the past couple days. It's only when Tsubaki asks her what she wants to do that she realizes there's a problem. The haunting wails only grow louder as they approach the wreckage of the ship, and Maka's heart sinks with the knowledge that an encounter with these creatures is inevitable.

"Nothing," she sighs in response. "We're going to continue on like we have been – we _need_ to get to that wreck, the creatures be damned." She eyes the motley, bedraggled crew before her. If it weren't for the fact that designer suits and dresses are still identifiable beneath the mud-stained, tattered clothing they wear, she would never have pinned them for high society folk. She takes a deep breath. "Does everyone have a weapon of some sort?" she asks. "If not, stick close to someone who does."

As it turns out, it's only Kidd and Blake who don't have weapons. Tsubaki is military, as is Maka, and Soul has Maka's blaster. The surprise is in the Thompson sister, who lift the torn remains of their skirts to reveal thigh holsters and slim, hidden blasters. Liz shrugs at the look on Maka's face.

"We might be society girls, but Kidd offered to hire us as his bodyguards. It gives us an excuse to keep weapons on ourselves – I feel naked without one after Andel. Sorry we didn't tell you, but we're used to not telling anyone."

Maka nods firmly. "Good," she says, "that's fine. Keep Kidd safe. Tsubaki, you've got Blake."

"Yes, sir!"

Maka slides her scythe out of its holster on her back, keeping it at the ready as they continue their walk through the destruction the _Shibusen_ left in her wake. Hours pass, and by the time the sun sets, her shoulders are tense and knotted. She rolls them uneasily in an attempt to limber them up once again.

They're walking amongst larger wreckage now. They pass several downed escape pods, and Liz and Patty stay true to their promise. They emerge with extra rations and sealed canteens, and the grim looks on their faces say it all. They have found no survivors. It is what Maka expected, but it doesn't change the damper that it puts on the group's attitude.

The howls of the Kishin are even louder now, and much more frequent. _The majority of them must be nocturnal_ , Maka decides. But that brings up an even bigger question – does she stop and camp for the night, leaving only a couple people on guard duty, or do they press on and change their sleep schedule so that they sleep during the day?

One look at her entourage gives Maka her answer: there is no way that any of them are surviving until morning without sleep. Besides, despite how cold it gets at night, at least it gets dark – and there's no chance for sunburn. Sleeping during the day here would be nigh on impossible, and if someone did fall asleep, they'd burn to a crisp.

So Maka calls them to a halt and they set up camp for the evening amongst the wreckage of the _Shibusen_. As morbid as it is, its presence is comforting – it means that they are closer to the wreck herself, which in turn means the end of their long march, shelter, and potential communications equipment. She doesn't want to think about what they'll do if Kidd and Liz can't jury-rig a communications array from what's left.

If that's the case, then they'll salvage what supplies they need and what materials they can find, and they'll try to live out the rest of their lives on this godforsaken planet. They'll be modern-day Robinson Crusoes, but at least they'll have each other.

And then it won't matter that Soul is a son of the prestigious Evans family and she's just a farmgirl who happened to get lucky.

"Maka?" a voice asks beside her, "Are you all right?"

Speak of the devil, and he may appear – red eyes and all. Maka sighs. "Yeah, I'm fine," she says. "At least, as fine as I can be. I was just, y'know, thinking about what'll happen if we can't get the communications up."

"We'll get them up," he says confidently. "Kidd and Liz are amazing."

"But what if we don't, Soul?" Maka says pleadingly, turning to him. "What if we're doomed to live the rest of our lives on this planet?"

Soul looks down at her with those blazing red eyes of his, visible even in the darkness, and shrugs as he turns toward where the others are building what fire they can. "I … wouldn't mind that," he says hesitantly.

Maka's heart skips a beat, and her hand finds his down by her side. "I … don't think I would, either. We'd have great company."

"And no paps," Soul reminds her. "No media to get all up in our faces." He laughs. "It sounds tempting just to give up on going home."

He squeezes her hand, and she smiles grimly as she stares into the baby flame that Patty's nursing. It's ridiculous how seriously she's taking his suggestion, which he surely made in gest. She knows they can't stay here. The climate is unfriendly. The Kishin are threatening. Soul has his responsibilities to go back to, and she has hers. She knows that as soon as they return, they won't ever see each other again outside of news holos. She'll spend the rest of her life wondering, _what if?_

She doesn't want to spend the rest of her life wondering _what if_ , and she's never been a girl afraid of going after what she wants. She wanted to go to the Academy, so she did. She wanted to be the top of her class, so she was. She wanted to use her scythe, so she did. She wanted be assigned a position on the front lines, so she was. She wanted to get as many people out of the SNAFU that was the campaign in Death City, so she did.

She wanted to survive the wreck of the _Shibusen_ , so she did. She wants to get everyone off this planet alive, so she will.

And in that moment, she wants to know what it's like to kiss Soul Evans.

She takes a deep breath. "Soul?" she asks, squeezing his hand tighter.

"Yeah?"

"There's, uhm, there's an escape pod just a little ways back. I was thinking of nabbing a couple extra thermal sheets. Could you come with me? I don't think it's wise to go alone when the Kishin are so close."

"Oh, yeah, sure. Do you wanna just tell the others real quick? They should probably know where we've gone."

"Good idea, I'll be right back."

She informs Tsubaki about where they're going, and what for, and the other girl nods. "Just be safe," she says. Her slightly teasing tone carries with it a double entendre, and Maka turns quickly to hide a blush.

And then she' leading Soul into the darkness away from the fire, where she did actually see a downed escape pod a little bit earlier. She stops just beside it, turning instead back to Soul. The man looks at her, slightly confused. "Maka, what –"

But his query is cut off as she stretches up to her tiptoes, wraps her arms around his neck, and pulls him in so his lips meet hers. He's stiff at first, but as he realizes what's happening he relaxes into the kiss, wrapping his arms around her in return and dipping down so that she's no longer on her toes.

Maka sighs into him at the slightly rough sensation of his chapped lips moving against her own just-as-chapped ones. His mouth is warm against hers in the chilled night air, and her arms wrap tighter around his neck, her hands sliding up into his hair as she tries to get closer.

She gasps softly against his mouth, and he takes the opportunity to run his tongue along her lower lip. She moans at the sensation – it's been far too long – and accepts him eagerly. Their tongues dance languidly together, as if they have all the time in the world. Maka feels her knees going weak.

It is the culmination of what began that night aboard the _Shibusen_ ; of the cautious flirtation that disaster so eagerly struck down. They are no longer the polished, articulate people who wear fancy suits and smart uniforms; yet, down here on the ground, in the torn and filthy remains of those same clothes, everything feels so much more real. The neon drinks are gone, but she knows his eyes are just as deep as they were as the first time she saw him, and the stars above them are a thousand times more beautiful than the false Victorian ballroom could ever be.

They are no longer Major Albarn and Soul Evans, but simply Maka and Soul – two falling stars streaking across the sky.

She never wants to let go. She knows that with falling comes the inevitable impact – that moment where everything blows up in their faces, leaving only a crater behind. But that isn't something she has to worry about. Not yet.

And so she and Soul just hold on tighter.


	12. Chapter 12

**SOUL**

For a brief instant, Soul wonders if he's hallucinating.

Maka's lips are on his lips and her hands are in his hair and he wonders if the heat and exhaustion have finally addled his mind. But when he wraps his arms around her slender frame she's as solid as anything he's ever known, and he sighs in contentment as he pulls her closer.

This is not what he was expecting when Maka asked him to join her in gathering extra thermal sheets. He hadn't expected anything except exactly what she said, but at the same time, he's not all that surprised. Although he didn't it coming, the Maka he now knows doesn't hesitate once she comes up with a plan. And evidently, she had come up with a plan.

Somewhere in the back of his head, the voice still nags him. _She only pities you_ , it says. _It's painfully obvious how much you like her, and she's simply indulging you for the short time you have left on this planet before you go back to your lives._

He does his best to ignore it, a task made infinitely easier by a distraction in the form of the girl he's been crushing on for a week now. He loses track of the time that passes, but it's at least a couple minutes later that they part. Soul grins when he realizes she's breathing as heavily as he is, and leans down so that his forehead rests against hers. She beams right back.

"Do you know just how long I've wanted to do that?" the words slip past his lips before he can even think of stopping them.

Maka simply hums back inquisitively, her eyes closing as her hands slip from his hair to rest on his shoulders and behind his neck. Soul chuckles softly.

"Neither do I, really. I think it happened somewhere between the _Shibusen_ and the ground."

This time, it's Maka's turn to laugh. "So you really fell for me, did you?" she jests, although she tenses around him as she speaks.

The words hover in the air between them for a few seconds before Soul decides there's no use in denying the truth. "And I fell hard," he replies lightheartedly. "I think I still have a couple of the bruises, if you'd like to see."

Maka relaxes, sagging against him. They stand there together for a few peaceful moments, just holding on to one another, before she says, "I must smell terrible right now. I don't know how you can stand to be around me."

Soul shrugs. "I smell just as terrible – probably worse – and you're doing all right."

"I can't wait to have a shower again. Or a bath. I had an actual bath on the _Shibusen_ for the first time in years. It was _so_ nice."

"I'm looking forward to food that isn't emergency rations, and _cold_ water that doesn't taste like metal."

"Whoa, don't get ahead of yourself there, Soul."

"What can I say?" he asks, "I'm used to the finer things in life."

"Yeah," Maka says, "I know."

 _Aaannd that was the wrong thing to say. Congratulations, you just reminded her of the insurmountable class difference between you. Way to go, Soul._

But the silence that falls between them is a comfortable one, each drawing from the other's body heat in the frigid night air of the planet. Maka has been his rock since the first tremor aboard the _Shibusen_ so many days ago, and he dares to think that he has been hers as well. It made him feel more needed than he's ever felt in his entire life.

"You know," he mumbles softly, "I'm … actually really glad the _Shibusen_ crashed. Isn't that terrible? But I've gotten to experience so much more freedom down here on this planet and I ever did among those stars."

"It's been an adventure," Maka agrees, "but one that I could have gone without. Especially after the debacle in Death City. I'm only eighteen, Soul. I shouldn't have been solely responsible for the survival of so many people – _twice_ now. I'm supposed to be following orders at this age, not giving them."

"But you're so _good_ at giving them," Soul says. Maka looks up at him, and he swears he can see the starlight from above reflected in her eyes.

"I don't know whether I should feel flattered or offended," she says.

Soul smiles. "The first," he murmurs, dipping closer. "Definitely the first."

And then he kisses her again.

This kiss is no less intense than the first, because both of them are aware there's a deadline on whatever this is between them. They have until they're off-planet, and after that, everything is uncertain. Would she even feel this way if they hadn't been forced into this life-or-death scenario?

 _You know she wouldn't._

He banishes the thought.

So lost are they in each other that neither of them hears the screams at first over the sound of blood rushing in their ears. Then Maka violently rips herself from him and he stands in bewilderment as she whispers in horror, "Do you hear that?"

He does.

The unmistakable _Keeeeeeeeee-SHIN!_

The distinct sound of blaster fire.

The familiar arrogant cry of "You're no match for a god!"

They simply stare at each other for seconds, frozen in fear, shock, and guilt. At last, they breathe in unison, "The camp!"

Grasping hands, they sprint back to the campsite, the thermal sheets forgotten. Soul clumsily draws Maka's blaster with his left hand while Maka deftly grabs her scythe from its holster with her right. His heart is still racing, and he tries to keep his hands from trembling. Despite the howls they heard over and over again during their hike, he hadn't thought they would actually need to face mysterious creatures. A small, naïve part of him had hoped the things were friendly.

That's evidently not the case.

The two of them crash back into the area of light cast by the campfire, and Soul is unable to contain a gasp of fear. He suspects he hears Maka doing the same.

The kishin is ugly. And terrifying.

It looks … _almost_ human. It has two legs and feet with toes, two arms with hands and fingers, and a head, but it's all twisted into a crude mockery of a human being that sends shivers down the spine and strikes fear in the heart. The way its fingers and toes glint in the firelight suggests the presence of sharp claws, and its hide – for there's no way it can be considered _skin_ – is ashen grey and unnerving.

"Maka!" Tsubaki yells, "Help! The blasters are useless against them!"

"Fuck," Maka mutters, and Soul realizes that he's been standing paralyzed in fear for several seconds. He looks over toward her, and her brow is furrowed in the way he has come to learn means business.

He turns back to where the kishin is terrorizing Liz and Tsubaki, and the pit of dread in his stomach threatens to consume him as their blaster bolts have no effect on the creature. The shots burn its hide enough to irritate it, but there is no lasting damage. He adjusts his grip on Maka's blaster as he tries to adjust his breathing.

 _See,_ the voice taunts him, _even when Maka does everything she can to make you useful, you're still useless._ _Useless, useless, useless, use –_

"Shut up!" he cries, unable to contain his frustration any more. He realizes his mistake when the kishin turns sharply and stares him down. It's only his sheer terror that silences the voice.

"Soul, what –" Maka begins to say, but then the kishin wails its bone-chilling wail and charges at them. Immediately she's back on guard, her tangled ponytail whipping around she sets her scythe in a battle stance.

"It's coming at you!" Patty cries, clutching at a bleeding arm.

" _Thank_ you, Patty. I didn't see that!" Maka shouts back, raising her scythe. Soul lifts his blaster with shaky hands and fires at the rapidly-approaching monster. The shot goes wide, but manages to clip the Kishin in the shoulder. It howls in pain, but doesn't slow as it continues toward them.

"Stand back, Soul," Maka says. "I don't want to slice you in half by accident."

Soul wants to help – he really does – but he sees that there's no place for him in this fight. He steps back reluctantly, but keeps his finger on the trigger.

 _It's your fault she's in this mess._

He tells the voice that she would have gotten involved anyway – there was no way she would have stood aside and watched the others get killed by the thing. Patty is already injured, and others probably hurt as well. As much as he fears for Maka's safety, he knows that this is something she has to do. He knows it may very well be something that only she _can_ do.

Maka flexes her arms and swings her scythe into the kishin without hesitation. It's the first time he's seen her use the weapon for something other than chopping the too-tall grass in front of them as they hike, and it's beautiful. The warrior's screech that escapes her lips only serves to make the moment that much more intense.

As she leaves a gaping wound in the creature's side, he wonders how she could possibly be the same girl who wrapped around him so sinuously; who felt so small and fragile in his arms only minutes before. Amidst the danger, or perhaps because of it, he feels his admiration for her swell.

Then a flailing claw gets too close for comfort, and his head is back in the fight taking place before him.

Maka swings at the beast time and time again, each time leaving a deeper laceration than the time before. Tsubaki nails the thing in the spine with a blaster shot, and as the kishin turns to face its new aggressor, Maka leaps and brings the blade of her scythe down hard on the creature's neck. A horrible _crack_ sounds through the night, and the kishin wails as it collapses to its knees.

She's raising her weapon for the final blow when Kidd screams. She doesn't even startle as she brings the scythe down hard and severs the kishin's head from the rest of its body. Blood spatters across her hand, and as she goes to wipe a spot off her cheek, she leaves an even larger streak behind.

Silhouetted in the flickering firelight, her very presence calls to mind that of a grim reaper, complete with scythe in hand. He's been likening her to an angel this entire time, but only now does he consider the possibility that she might be an angel of death.

 _Keeeeeee-shiiiiiiin!_

Kidd runs screaming into the clearing with a second kishin on his heels. This one is just as ugly as the first, and just as hell-bent on destruction. Liz and Tsubaki open fire immediately, Soul following immediately thereafter, even if the majority of his attention is still on the girl before him.

"You alright?" He asks amidst blaster fire.

"Yeah," she says. "I've got this one." And then she's running full-tilt toward the second beast, hurdling the first as if it's not even there. Her scythe is hoisted over her shoulder, and she takes a flying leap at the monster. Although she misses its neck, her swing is so strong that she severs one of its arms from its body.

Kidd scurries off as the kishin's full attention shifts to Maka.

 _Keeeeee-shiin!_

All her focus is on the fight before her.

 _Keeee-shiiin!_

She doesn't hear the third one approaching, nor does anyone else. They're all entirely entranced by the battle raging between Maka and the second kishin.

But Soul hears it, and he spots it across the campsite. With horror, he realizes it's right in Maka's blind spot. He desperately tries to communicate this to her in a series of wild gestures, but she's not looking at him.

 _Well,_ the voice says, _here's your chance to not be useless for once_.

So he runs.

He runs faster than he ever has in his entire life, but the kishin is faster. Still, he doesn't let up. If Maka gets injured, then that spells the end for the rest of them, too. That scythe is the most important weapon in their arsenal, and none of the rest of them know how to use it.

At least, that's the logical reasoning behind his actions. The real reason he's so desperate is because of all that was encapsulated in those few minutes they had together in the dark, and whatever it is that may be between them. And there, in firelight, with his legs burning and his lungs threatening to burst, he realizes; 'whatever it is' may not be love – not yet – but it has all the potential to be.

"Maka!" He's only feet away now. Maka finally deals the killing blow to the second kishin, but by then it's too late. By the time she turns around, he's right there, and the kishin is right there, and they've run out of time. His star has fallen, if only for a vain attempt at keeping hers in the sky.

His blaster won't do any good, and so that leaves only one option. He takes one final step and throws himself forward –

Screaming pain.

The worst pain he has ever felt rips through his chest as he takes the blow meant for her. He barely hears his name over his fading consciousness, and he vaguely wonders if all those holos about people dying for love aren't actually as full of shit as he'd once thought they were. After all, here he is, doing exactly the same for only the distant possibility of such a thing.

" _See,"_ he wants to tell the voice, _"not so useless after all."_

But he can no longer see even the dim flickering of the firelight, and he's gone.


	13. Chapter 13

**MAKA**

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Maka had known things were going too smoothly. She had known karma was going to come back and bite them in the ass, and she had known everything would go terribly wrong. She just hadn't known what, or when. She had expected something like starvation, or dehydration, or heatstroke, or … _something_.

She had never expected this.

Maka remembers screaming, Soul's name ripping from her throat in a cry Tsubaki would later say was as haunting as that of the kishin. She doesn't remember much after that until the moment the third kishin was dead at her feet, her scythe dripping ominously with viscous black blood. She remembers watching in horror as the others gathered around Soul, frightened to jostle him too much as Tsubaki and Liz tried to staunch the bleeding with what they had on hand.

It's daylight now, and she stares blankly into the ashes of the night's campfire. She has not slept; every time she tries, the image of Soul throwing himself in front of her flashes before her eyes. To keep herself distracted, she had volunteered to monitor Soul's condition throughout the night. Both fortunately and unfortunately, nothing has changed. Fortunately, because he is still breathing. Unfortunately, because he has not opened his eyes since they slipped closed so many hours ago.

Maka has seen death before. She earned her war hero status during the military's bloodiest campaign to date. She has seen a lot of death. She has seen the deaths of friends and strangers alike, but those people were soldiers; death was on the cards from the moment they enlisted. She had seen civilian casualties as well, but in the overarching context of war, that too is to be expected. The point of the matter is, no death – whether it be soldier or civilian – has ever affected her in the same way the very _possibility_ of Soul's does.

He was never supposed to end up like this. He was – _is_ – part of the elite, a socialite with far too much privilege and far too much time on his hands. He deserves the comfort of the ballroom aboard the _Shibusen_ where they met; not the hard, foreign ground with a terrible slash across his chest where he is now.

He deserves a good society girl, not a roughened soldier like herself. She's military; death is still as much of a possibility for her as it was for her fellow soldiers who have already suffered it. She knows that, if he survives this – if _they_ survive this – she's just going to break his heart.

She shouldn't have kissed him.

She can no longer deny the fact that she's personally invested in this silver-haired socialite, and it's going to make things so much harder. It already is.

"Maka."

It's Tsubaki's voice, which is not the one that she wants to hear so desperately. She turns with a heavy sigh and barely contains her flinch as she meets the other girl's gaze.

"We need to move out. We need to get to the ship today, Maka. Everyone else is ready to go."

And Maka hates herself, because it should have been her who made that call; however, instead of leading she's staring at the grey ashes of a long-dead campfire. She cannot believe that she has allowed herself to become so emotionally compromised.

She sighs again as she pushes herself to her feet, her joints stiff. "Right," she says, more resignedly than anything. She takes a deep breath and tries to work some authority back into her tone. "We can't leave Soul here. We should lay him on one of the thermal sheets, and use that as a makeshift stretcher. We can have a person on each corner."

"Right," Tsubaki says sharply. "I'll get Liz and Blake. The four of us should be able to handle it."

"Thank you, Tsubaki."

Getting Soul onto the thermal sheet is a two-person operation, so Maka grips him under the shoulders while Blake grabs his legs. The blue-haired socialite is much more subdued than Maka has ever seen him in the past, and she wonders if the current state of his friend has driven home the seriousness of their situation.

Using the thermal sheet as a stretcher proves to be more difficult than Maka anticipated. It has no handles, and the smooth foil material is slippery in sweaty hands. The hot sun beats down on them unerringly as it has for the entire time they've been here. Her navy blue jacket has been stuffed into her grab bag, along with the blaster that did Soul a fat lot of good. The blouse of her dress uniform is unbuttoned down to nearly-indecent, and her sleeves are rolled up to her elbows. It's a major breach of uniform protocol, but at this point, she just doesn't care.

Getting to the ship takes hours longer than it should have because they need to stop often in order to rest cramping hands and blistered feet. The Thompsons have been wrapping their feet religiously, but the bandages they use are getting filthier and more torn up as they go. Maka wants to lend them new ones, but the rest of her first-aid materials went to bandaging Soul. They pass around what's left of the water, and manage to get Soul to drink some as well.

At last, they crest one last grassy knoll. Maka's heart leaps for joy as the _Shibusen_ looms before them, all shiny metal and broken parts. Never has anything looked so beautiful. Blake whoops loudly, nearly dropping Soul in the process. Tsubaki is quick to shush him.

"The kishin were hiding out in the debris back there last night," she says. "We don't know if there are any more lurking around here."

They hurry to the ship as fast as they can manage, each cautious due to Tsubaki's warning. To their relief, there are no howling cries.

And then there's _shade_.

"Ohhh thank god," Liz says, dropping to the ground as soon as Soul is lowered gently. "This is wonderful." Her sister joins her, and then their cousin, and Maka can't help but smile even as she thinks they're relaxing too early. They've made it to the ship, yes, but they still need the supplies within it desperately.

Soul groans from his supine position on the thermal sheet, and Maka's attention flies to him instantly. "Soul?" she asks hesitantly, but gets no reply. He's still unconscious.

She makes her decision. She'll let the others stop to catch their breath, but she cannot do the same. She needs to find the medbay of the ship, and fast. Infection is already starting to set in, and if they don't do something about it soon, the slim chance of survival that Soul has will slip through their fingers.

"I'm going to find a way in," she announces, setting her scythe down and grabbing her bag. "We can't afford to wait on those medical supplies."

Kidd jumps up. "I'll help you," he says. "I know this ship like the back of my hand. I don't want you getting lost inside."

"Thanks, Kidd."

She casts one last glance back at Soul, but he's in the very capable hands of Tsubaki and the others – excluding maybe Blake, but his concern for his friend has calmed him down quite a bit. She knows that getting the first aid supplies is the best thing she can do for him right now. Still, guilt weighs in her heart as she and Kidd try to find an entrance to the downed ship.

The _Shibusen_ , of course, is massive. Maka didn't realize exactly how massive she was when she first boarded her, but now that she looms before her, she wonders how she missed it. She feels so small, standing next to the ship, so insignificant. She and Kidd trek alongside her for a while, relishing in the shade she casts over them. It's Kidd who directs her to the aft end of the ship.

"She's not right-side up," he says, "and the catwalks span across her center. We want to avoid those if at all possible."

Maka shivers despite the heat. She remembers those catwalks. She remembers those catwalks very well, although it's a memory she's been doing her best to cast from her mind. She remembers how close she came to being a spot on the cavern wall.

They find a spot where a piece of the sheet metal covering the hull of the ship has torn away from the rest of it, and together they work to pry it back far enough to allow them to slip through. Maka pauses, placing a hand on Kidd's arm when he's about to step through. He looks at her inquisitively.

"It's just," she says, "it's been over a week since the crash." She'd finally calculated the amount of time that had passed as she stared at the embers of the campfire the night before, and this is their eighth day, at least. "We're walking into a tomb, Kidd." _And you've probably never seen death before, despite the name of your family's company_.

The engineer, in his tattered black suit, sighs as he focuses his golden eyes on her. She notices for the first time that there are patches of hair on his right side that are starting to lose their color. She wonders if it's an effect of the fright from the crash, but doesn't dwell on it as he speaks.

"I know, Maka. But I was useless back there in the fight against the kishin, and I want to help. This has to be done, right?"

Maka takes a deep breath. "Right."

She follows Kidd inside, wincing as her uniform shirt catches and tears on a protruding piece of reinforcement bar. Once they're inside, she's immediately grateful for her military preparedness as she pulls a flashlight from her bag and turns it on in the pitch darkness.

The second thing she notices, aside from the dark, is how okay the air is. It's stagnant, and stale, but it does not carry the distinct scent of rotting flesh that she feared it would. It must mean they're far from the escape pods and the more densely populated areas of the ship.

Still, the air is worse than that which Kidd has ever been accustomed to, and he falls into a coughing fit that echoes through the ghost ship. When Maka asks if he's okay, he nods. "Let's just make this quick," he says.

They're lucky in the fact that while the ship is not upright, she's not sideways, either. There is a horrible tilt to the floor, but it's nothing Maka and her beat-up dress boots can't handle. She and Kidd pick their way through the ship, gingerly avoiding debris and wreckage as they go.

As they carefully make their way through the darkened ship, Kidd determines that they're on the third floor, the first two having been smashed beyond recognition when the ship crashed. This means they're only one floor below where they need to be, because the medbay is on the fourth. The elevators are entirely out of order, and so they're forced to take the stairs.

And _damn_ if that isn't a harrowing experience. The tilt of the ship means the stairs are tilted too, and it's just enough that they're forced to grip the handrail with both hands in order to keep themselves from falling. Maka makes the mistake of glancing down once, and she freezes up long enough to prompt Kidd into asking if she's okay as she relives the worst couple minutes of her life.

She moves on. She'll deal with her newfound terror of heights another day.

They make a few wrong turns, but they eventually make it to the medbay. They step cautiously – the crash has thrown everything across the room that wasn't fastened down. Pill bottles and bandages litter the floor.

"Here," Maka says, handing the flashlight to Kidd. "See if you can find any antibiotics in this mess." He takes the flashlight without hesitation, and she immediately begins stuffing packages of bandages into her bag. There are several unpackaged rolls, but Maka is unsure of what bacteria could be lingering in this place after being exposed to the foreign air and the dead bodies elsewhere in the ship.

She doesn't want to give Soul another infection in the process of trying to cure the one he has now.

They look through the cabinets as well, and they amass a collection of medical supplies that will have to be sufficient. Maka debates looking for food and water supplies as well, but decides it's more important to get back to Soul and properly dress his wound.

That's the rational decision anyone would make. Not just her.

They carefully retrace their steps, the climb down the stairs even worse than the climb up. Maka's hands are sweaty, making it difficult to grip the railing, and she can feel her heartbeat in her toes. It's an utter relief when her feet are back on ground which she cannot fall off of, and it's even more of a relief when they step back out into the sunlight.

But when she and Kidd get back to where they left the others, something's amiss.

Maka counts Soul, Liz, Patty, Tsubaki, and Blake, but they're not alone. There's someone else standing with them, talking to Tsubaki, and Maka's heart skips several beats. Who is that? No, _what_ is that? She cannot trust that this humanoid figure is actually human, not after the Kishin.

She draws her blaster from her bag, cursing the fact she left her scythe behind. Deftly clicking off the safety, she ignores Kidd's gasp of shock beside her and holds the weapon steady as she approaches.

"Hey!" she shouts, "Who the fuck are you and what the hell do you want?"

The mysterious figure turns toward her, and she registers for the first time that this person's hair is _pink_. She shrugs it off. Blake's hair is blue, so pink is almost a little more normal. "My name is Chrona," the figure says shakily, "a-and I can help you."

"Maka," Tsubaki calls, "they sound legit. You might want to listen to what they have to say."

Maka's eyes narrow in suspicion as she keeps the blaster leveled at this Chrona person. After a moment of deliberation, she makes a decision. "Keep talking," she barks.

And, despite quivering, Chrona does.


	14. Chapter 14

**SOUL**

When Soul wakes for the first time, the first thing he is aware of is not the horrific wound down his chest. No, it's the warmth of the hand clasped around his own, and he doesn't have to guess whose it is. With the reassuring presence of Maka at his side, he slips back into unconsciousness.

The second time he wakes, it's only just long enough to swallow some water and a couple pills, and he's not really aware of anything.

The third and final time he rejoins the world of the living, his eyes blink open only to gaze into an entirely unfamiliar face. This man has glasses and stitches running down his visage, and he stares down at him with wide, crazed eyes. Soul desperately tries to sit up and scoot away from him, but a stabbing, throbbing pain stops him in his tracks. He flops back down onto the sheets in surrender.

Wait … sheets?

Soul blinks hard, trying to clear his vision of the aftereffects of being asleep for so long. As he glances around his surroundings frantically, he realizes that he's not hallucinating. He's lying on a mattress – an uncomfortable one by his previous standards, but after spending a week sleeping with only a thin foil sheet between him and the hard ground, the lumpy cot feels like heaven. He's covered with a sheet and a dingy comforter, and there are actual _walls_ around him.

"Wh –" _Where am I,_ he tries to say, but he can hardly get even the first syllable out. His mouth feels as if it's been stuffed with cotton, and his throat hurts when he swallow. The man sitting before him, dressed in a lab coat so worn one can tell where it's been torn and re-stitched, picks a plastic cup up off the table beside them and hands it to Soul. Soul takes it cautiously, his hand shaking.

"Come on, kid," the man says. "If I'd wanted to poison you, I'd have done it by now. Drink."

 _I want Maka,_ he wants to say. If anyone could tell him whether or not this man is actually trustworthy, it would be her. Alas, she's not here right now, and so he's forced to take the man at his word. He raises the cup to his lips hesitantly, but the cool liquid flooding his mouth and running down his parched throat feels just as much like heaven as the mattress beneath him does. He's forgotten what water tastes like when it doesn't taste like warm metal.

A door creaks open, and Soul looks up to see another stranger enter the room. This person is younger, with a shock of pink hair, and Soul relaxes just a bit now that he's not alone with the crazy guy.

"Stein, Mom is – oh, Soul! You're awake!"

 _Stein_. So that's the man's name. Still, that doesn't change the fact that Soul would like to stay away from him if at all possible. He smiles weakly at the newcomer despite the fact his anxiety levels are beginning to rise. He still doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know where _Maka_ is.

"I-I'm Chrona," the newcomer introduces himself, wringing his hands. "I found you and your friends out by the wreck – the _Shibusen_ , was it? You were in pretty bad shape, b-but Stein was able to fix you up."

Soul shivers at the thought of Stein being anywhere close to him while he was unconscious, but he supposes he should be grateful. "Thank you," he rasps, thankful he can at least get words out now. "Where are we? Where's Maka?"

Stein heaves a sigh and pushes away from the bed in his rolling chair, spinning around before facing the two again. Pulling something that looks like a cigarette out of the pocket of his lab coat, he sticks it in his mouth but doesn't light it as he begins speaking. "Well, we're pretty much out in the middle of nowhere, but you've probably figured that out by now if you've been travelling for a week like your girlfriend says."

Soul ignores the girlfriend comment. They're not like that – he doesn't know how to qualify it, exactly – but it's not worth the effort to deny it, either. He doesn't _want_ to deny it. "Are you survivors as well?" he asks hopefully.

The older man shakes his head. "Not of your crash, kid. We were sent as part of a research team several years ago, but we haven't heard from the Inner Rim in almost as many years. Myself, Chrona, and Chrona's mother, Medusa, are all that's left of the original team."

"What … happened to the rest, if you don't mind me asking?" Soul says. "Was it the kishin?"

"The kishin? Oh, you mean the monsters. Yeah, we lost quite a few to those things. A few more died of strange infections and diseases. It's a dangerous world out there, you know. It's remarkable that you survived."

"Only because of Maka, really. She's the only one who knew what we needed to do." Again, he realizes he still doesn't know where she is. He asks again.

"Oh! Right!" Chrona exclaims, "S-sorry, I completely forgot! She, Tsubaki, and Elizabeth are out scavenging the ship for any communications parts that might be intact. T-they went out a while ago, so they should, uh, they should be back soon."

"So Blake, Patty, and Kidd are still here?" Soul asks, a tickle in the back of his throat prompting a coughing fit that leaves him scrambling to take another sip of the – seemingly not poisoned – water.

"Yeah," Chrona confirms. "I'll, uh, tell them you're awake! Oh, and Stein – Mom wants to see you about something. She didn't tell me what."

Stein stands from his chair. "All right, I'd better go see what she wants. She gets hissing mad when she's kept waiting for too long. Don't go too far, Soul. You don't want to reopen your wound."

"I'm not planning on it," Soul grumbles as the two strangers leave the room. And then, for the first time in over a week, he's completely on his own. It's a weird feeling – by this point he's so used to having all of their 'crew' within shouting distance that he's almost uncomfortable to be alone in a room by himself. Even if the cot is lumpy and his chest is bandaged up like a mummy's, it almost feels as if he were back home again, hiding in his room for lack of better shit to do.

But only a few minutes pass before the sound of running feet reach his ears. He barely has time to prepare himself before the door busts open, slamming against the opposite wall. The sound it makes hardly drowns out the cry of "SOUL, BUDDY!" that leaves his best friend's lips.

Soul grins weekly as his friends – because that's what they are now – gather around the bed. Blake claims the rolling chair that Stein just vacated while Patty makes herself comfortable at the foot of the cot. Kidd chooses to stand, but he's smiling as well.

"It's good to have you back," the black-haired man says. "We were worried."

"Yeah," Blake agrees, rolling closer. "I really thought Maka was gonna lose it there. Way to go, dude."

For a long moment, Patty doesn't say anything as she stares into his face. Soul eyes her warily until at last she says, "That Stein guy didn't do anything weird to you, right? He gives me vibes."

"Vibes?"

"Yeah, vibes. Like" – she shudders vigorously – "vibes."

"Uhm, no? I don't think he did? But I _was_ kind of unconscious." He looks to Blake. "How long have I been out?"

Blake leans back in the chair as he counts his fingers. "Let's see. You ghosted yourself the night before we reached the ship – totally not cool, dude. I had to carry your heavy ass all the way there. Then Chrona stumbled across us at the wreck, we got back here that night, and it's been … three days since then?"

Kidd nods.

"So yeah, four days, give or take a few hours. Maka's been a wreck. She seems fine, still doing the grand-old-leader shit she's been doing, but Tsubaki tells me that's what she does when she's messed up about something. She throws herself into something else." Blake takes a deep breath. "What happened between the two of you, dude? I mean, I know you like her but damn, you took a bullet for her! No, worse than a bullet! _Something_ must have happened –"

"It's none of your business," Soul cuts him off brusquely. "Now come on, it's been four days and somehow you've met three completely new people – who _weren't_ on the _Shibusen_ , on this abandoned planet. What's happened since I've been out? _Besides_ Maka freaking out," he says with a dark glare at his friend.

"Well," Kidd says, "this might be the stroke of luck we need to get home. Let's face it – we were never going to be able to get a communications array working without some sort of power source, despite what we told ourselves. We might have been able to jury-rig an energy system using some of the solar panels that were on the hull, but nearly all of them are cracked. Besides, it's unlikely that we could harness the sheer _amount_ of power we would need to send a signal back to the Inner Rim. I won't bore you with the specs; however, the people here have a fairly powerful generator running this place, and they're just as eager to get off this planet – perhaps even more so than we are."

He pauses to take a breath. "The problem is that all the communications tech they have is either not designed to send out a long-distance signal, or it's too ancient to do so. Liz and the others are out searching to see what they can find on the ship that we can use to build our own array, or at least fix and enhance what they have."

"Why aren't you out there with them?" Soul asks, taking another sip of water. "You're the engineer."

"Liz is better at the practical application than I am," Kidd admits, "and they, uh, wouldn't let me go."

"'There will be dead people on board,'" Patty pipes up, imitating her sister. "'We've all seen dead people. You haven't, you lily-livered rich boy. We don't want to deal with you puking or passing out.'"

"Okay," Kidd grumbles, "she didn't exactly say _that_ …"

"But it's what she meant," Patty says smugly. "Cheer up, 'Cuz. She's only looking after you the best she can. She still feels like she owes you."

"Well, she shouldn't. Come _on_ , it's all the girls out doing the dirty work! That can't be right!"

Soul shrugs. "It is when two of them are military and the other two grew up on the streets," he says, "and the men are all – what did you say, Patty? Lily-livered rich boys?"

Patty nods happily and Kidd sighs.

"I know," he says. "I just feel useless, stuck back here. At least I've had the time to really survey the schematics of the generator and the existing communications equipment."

Soul snorts. _Welcome to the club_ , he wants to say, but he doesn't. Instead, he's unable to keep himself from yawning loudly. "Sorry," he says. "I shouldn't be tired after four days of sleep, but I am."

"Stein said you would be," Kidd says. "You should get some more sleep – you need to do all the healing you can. We'll come back later."

Soul nods, his eyelids already slipping shut. "Tell Maka to wake me up when she gets back," he says as the others begin filing out. "I wanna see 'er."

"Will do, bud," Blake says.

He's asleep before the door closes, and he embraces the warm darkness where nothing hurts – not even the large gash in his chest. He does not know how long sleeps for, but when he wakes, it's to that familiar warmth of a hand clasped around his own. _Maka_.

He doesn't realize he's spoken aloud until she lifts her head off the mattress to gaze up at him with wide green eyes, the same eyes that entranced him aboard the _Shibusen_ so long ago. Darkness has fallen, but the dim lamplight only makes her eyes glow even more vibrantly.

"You're awake," she says roughly, her voice wavering. "I thought – I thought – what were you _thinking?_ "

Soul cracks a half-smile. "It's good to see you too," he says, his own voice thick with the remnants of sleep. "I thought I asked them to tell you to wake me up."

"Idiot," she says, wiping desperately at her face with her free hand. She's too late, though. He sees the glint of the lamplight shining off the tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. "You could have gotten yourself killed! You were so _close_ by the time we finally got you to Stein! _Why?_ "

 _I wasn't thinking_ , he could say, or _I forgot I was holding the blaster_. Both are stupid, stupid excuses though, and so he decides to tell the truth. "I couldn't watch you die," he says hoarsely. "Everyone … we're all depending on you. We need you." No, that wasn't exactly right. " _I_ need you."

"I'm only going to break your heart, and you know it," she whispers, clasping his hand tighter in both of hers. "Once we're off this planet, and the tabloids have had enough of us I – I'm going back into the military, Soul. I can't do that to you."

Soul squeezes her hand. "I'll wait," he says. He knows it's a rash promise to make after the roughest week of his life, but he has never meant anything so sincerely. "How many years do you have left?"

"At least three," she says, "but Soul, anything could happen …"

"Then we'll figure it out later," Soul replies with a yawn. "I'm too tired for any of this 'what-if' shit right now." He tugs on her hand. "Come on. It gets chilly at night."

"But we're inside now –"

"I don't care."

"But your injuries –"

"Maka. You're tiny. You could lie beside me and not touch me at all if you tried hard enough. Come up here."

Even in the dim lighting he can see her smile, and it's beautiful. "Okay, fine," she says. "You win. Move over – carefully!" she adds as he moves a little too enthusiastically and sends a flash of pain through his nervous system.

But then she's snuggled in next to him, and it's as good as any painkiller that insane doctor might have given him.


	15. Chapter 15

**MAKA**

She doesn't mean for it to happen, but after that first night, she spends every night beside Soul. The rational part of her still tells her she shouldn't, but she's finding that part of her brain easier and easier to ignore as the days pass. Blake gives her shit about it at first, but he shuts up when Tsubaki tells him that he, of all people, has no room to talk.

They all take a few days to unwind, to clean themselves up, and to allow their sunburns to heal. While it's true that they were at the compound for the three days before Soul woke, their concern for their friend had prevented them from relaxing. Now that he's out of the woods, the atmosphere in the small building is much lighter.

But they can't allow themselves to grow complacent. In a meeting she and Kidd have with Chrona, Stein, and Medusa, they decide that they will attempt to have a working communications array up and running by the time Soul is once again fully mobile. Any sooner than that and they'll have a hard time getting Soul out to the rescue lift, and everyone in the tiny bunker wants to get the hell off this planet.

Five years, that's how long the scientists have been here. As of almost a year ago now, they're the last ones remaining of the fifteen-person team that was sent down to the planet's surface, sixteen if one counts Chrona, who was only thirteen when they arrived. Chrona hadn't had any relatives to go live with when their mother had been picked for the mission, and Medusa had flat-out refused to put them into any sort of foster care system.

Maka finds it hard to believe that the wisp of a person that is Chrona is the same age she is. For all she is confident, they are not. For all she knows about the galaxy, he knows so much less. None of the three know anything about current events from the past five years, and so Maka spends time filling them in.

While she trusts Chrona, she doesn't enjoy one-on-one time with Medusa and Stein. Neither of them seem entirely right in the head, and she supposes it's not surprising after five years of isolation with their friends and coworkers dying one after the other. Still, it's off-putting, and so she avoids them when possible.

When Maka isn't with Soul, she spends her time helping Kidd and Liz in any way she can. She's a soldier, not an engineer, but she's always prided herself in being a fast learner. Even if she's just ferrying pieces back and forth, it gives her something to do.

And so a week passes in this manner. It's a week of mattresses and lukewarm showers with crudely handmade soap. It's a week of healing, and a week of recuperation, and it's a week that Maka never expected to have. She smiles when she sees that Chrona and Patty get along swimmingly, even if the younger Thompson sister intimidates the pink-haired teenager. She doesn't complain when Blake and Tsubaki disappear to do questionable things. She doesn't mind that Kidd and Liz shut themselves away with schematics and scavenged parts and speak some technobabble language that only the two of them understand.

She doesn't even care that she's wearing a dead person's clothes. They all are, and although Maka was stupidly reluctant to give up her nasty-ass dress uniform, clean clothes are a godsend. Her hair is another matter altogether, though. If it weren't for the fact it was pin-straight in the first place, it would have been impossible to brush out despite the fact she has been finger-combing her ponytail religiously.

Unfortunately, when she finally cuts the tie out of her hair – because it wouldn't come out on its own – it leaves a permanent crease in her hair that still hasn't faded in the days that have passed since. Soul laughs at it, but he's also stunned to see her with her hair down.

Maka has to admit, in her borrowed clothes and with her hair down, she doesn't feel much like military. She cannot name a point in time in the last two years – no, more than that, because she can't remember a time while she was in the Academy, either – where she has been as casually dressed as she is now.

It's unnerving. She can tell that Tsubaki feels the same way now that she's no longer dressed in her combat tank and fatigue pants. They two soldiers exchange uneasy smiles, and then laugh as they know exactly what it is that's bothering the other.

Towards the end of the week, when Soul is well enough to at least shuffle around the compound, they take to sitting just outside the building during the twilight hours. As they watch the reds and oranges streak across the sky with the setting sun, Maka thinks that she's never been so grateful for being alive. She could sit there for hours, huddled against Soul's side with his hand in hers, but the chill of the night has not waned, and it forces them indoors each night.

At least now they have an 'indoors' to return to.

But for all she relishes the extra time she's been given to spend with Soul; for all she craves the stolen kisses they exchange in the dark of the night when no one else is paying attention; for all she wishes they could stay like this forever, with the friends they've made along the way … she's getting anxious. Maka has never been one to sit still. Since the moment she could walk, she's always been on the go, she's always had ambition, and she's always been working to achieve her goals.

So for all she loves the snail's pace of life at the compound, she wants out.

The worst part is, she know Soul can tell. It's in the way his sanguine gaze lingers on her face just a little longer as the days pass. It's in the way he holds her just a little tighter as the nights do.

He said he'd wait, but even with her mere eighteen years of life, Maka is jaded enough not to put her faith in his words. Three years is a long time. He might meet someone else, someone more appropriate for an Evans to love. She might meet someone else, even though she knows she would forever compare him to ruby eyes and snowy white hair.

The realest possibility is that she might die, and she doesn't want to hold him to a promise she has no way of knowing she can keep.

But still, they don't talk about it.

And, all too soon – but not nearly soon enough – the day comes to test the communications array that Kidd and Liz have been working on religiously since the compound's residents gave them permission.

Maka wakes that morning with a heavy heart, the solid warmth of Soul's chest and the arm wrapped around her nearly driving her to tears. As hellish as these two weeks have been, she realizes she wouldn't change them for the world. Going back to society, she'll still see Tsubaki from time to time, perhaps will even request for them to be placed in the same platoon, but the rest of them – Liz, Patty, Kidd, Blake, _Soul_ – will once again be untouchable.

Perfect. Infallible.

But never fake. How could they be? They've proven themselves time and time again to be the realest people she knows. It breaks her heart to imagine the false veneer they'll have to put on in order to fit back into society the way they once did.

Even with death permanently on the cards until she is discharged, Maka thinks she has the better end of the deal.

She begins to push herself upright, ready to get this day over with, but is halted by Soul's arm tightening around her. She heaves a small sigh. "Soul," she says.

"Wha?"

"I need you to let go of me."

"Don' wanna," he mumbles, but relinquishes his grip all the same. Maka smiles as she slides off the cot, wincing as her bare feet hit the cold concrete floor of the compound. She's wearing a shirt a couple sizes too big for her and a pair of shorts that threaten to slip down as she stands upright. Unsurprisingly, not one of the scientists sent to this planet was small enough to be her size.

"Come on, Soul," she says, doing her best to inject enthusiasm into her voice. "The others are probably already awake.

He groans, but rubs at his eyes.

"We're going to go home!" she says. "No more freezing at night and burning in the day! No more crazy doctors! You can get your wound properly treated!"

 _No more me_ , she doesn't say. _No more them. No more 'us.'_

But he hears it in her voice all the same. "It's going to be okay, Maka," he says, sitting up. "We're going to figure it out."

Maka bites her lip. "Yeah," she says simply before turning to grab the clothes she set out the night before and retreating into one of the compound's two tiny bathrooms. Only there does she allow the tears to fall, muffling her sobs in the wadded up mass of her oversized pajamas. _It's not fair_ , she thinks.

But life is never fair, and when she exits the bathroom, all traces of her breakdown have been wiped from her face. If her eyes are still a little red, no one says anything to her.

The atmosphere in the communications room is tense. There is not a single person who has not placed the entirety of their hopes and dreams on the outcome of whether this jury-rigged contraption works or not. Maka glances at those around her.

Kidd and Liz are worn and haggard, their fingers crossed and their backs tense. Maka doesn't know how many hours they have put into this device, but she guesses the number is way higher than anything she would have predicted.

Chrona, Stein, and Medusa stand together, their hands linked and their faces filled with hope and doubt at the same time. _Five years_ , she remembers. Five years they've been on this godforsaken planet, surviving off remaining provisions, boiled water, and small game they managed to catch. They want this thing to work more than all of the survivors of the _Shibusen_ put together.

Patty stands by Liz and Kidd, offering her support. She may have spent much of her time at the compound with Chrona, but she also spent many hours with the two engineers, staying up with them during late nights and providing them the relief they needed when things were rough. Maka thinks it's amazing how, throughout all of this, she's never lost her bubbly personality. She's never given up her optimism.

Blake has his arms around Tsubaki, who's gripping him so hard her knuckles are turning white. Maka hasn't seen much of them since they got to the compound, but she understands the two needed their space. It's no secret what their relationship on the _Shibusen_ was like, and besides, Maka's been caught up with Soul.

 _Soul._ He stands beside her, his hand just grazing hers, offering his support despite what pulling this off will mean for them. She grasps his hand gratefully, needing something to keep her tethered to the here and now. He grips her right back, and the worst part is she knows a part of her won't mind if this communications array turns out to be a bust. More time on this planet means more time with _him_.

But Maka cannot, for all her personal longing, bring herself to hope this _doesn't_ work. They all have so much riding on it, including her. She takes a deep breath as Kidd steps forward, gripping Soul's hand so hard it must be painful. He doesn't complain, though, and they wait with bated breath.

"Well, it's all hooked up to the generator, so I'm turning it on … _now_ ," Kidd says, flipping the switch buried amongst a mess of wires. A small light on the top of the device begins blinking, which to Maka's untrained eye, looks like a good sign. "Device is pinging," he announces. "No answering pings have yet been recorded."

The message is the _Shibusen_ 's distress call. The hope is that any nearby ship – _nearby_ being in astronomical terms – would pick up on it and use it as a homing beacon. If the atmosphere was tense before, it's at its breaking point now. Taking a calming breath, Maka lets go of Soul's hand and walks over to Stein, Medusa, and Chrona.

"I just want to say," she says, looking at each of them in turn, "thank you for helping us and having us here. This would not have been possible otherwise, and Soul would have died without your help."

"Don't thank us yet, darling," Medusa says, shaking her head. "We'll be the ones thanking you if this works. You gave us our hope back."

Maka smiles. "How about we call it even, then?"

Medusa nods, and for once, the creepy vibe Maka gets from her disappears. She feels guilty for not getting to know the woman better, but what's done is done. "Even sounds good," Medusa says.

They wait around the machine for hours, watching the hypnotizing blue light blink again and again and again. Kidd and Liz are dead on their feet, but no one feels like sleeping. Many of them have sunk to the floor, and already Maka's butt hurts from sitting on the hard concrete for too long.

She's playing with Soul's hair when it happens.

The machine _dings_.

Immediately, the sleepy room comes to life. Kidd rushes over to the machine, and his uncharacteristically loud whoop startles all of them. Maka's heart leaps not only in surprise, but with hope as well. She doesn't breathe. She _can't_ breathe.

"We got a hit!" Liz cries. "Someone got our message!"

Immediately, the room bursts into celebration. There are hugs all around, and Soul captures her lips right there in a heavy, desperate kiss. For once, Maka doesn't care that there are others around. She ignores the wolf whistles from Blake and Patty as she grasps the front of his shirt and pulls him even closer. How could she care?

They've run out of time


	16. Chapter 16

**SOUL**

He hears the transport long before he actually sees it; a dull, mechanical _whirring_ noise that sounds out of place in the otherwise peaceful, natural wasteland. As jarring as the sound is, it's music to his ears – and he knows music. As it reaches an epic crescendo, Soul wonders if it's a victory march or if the droning is more of a funeral dirge instead.

Can it be both?

He grips Maka's hand as they watch the transport descend from the heavens, the disturbance from its engines causing the tall grass to sway violently. Maka squeezes his hand so hard in return that he swears he feels something pop. He lets her.

It's been two days since their first contact with the ship. The _Grigori_ , Kidd ascertained through the few Morse code messages he exchanged with their saviors. He spoke the name with a sort of wonder – the _Grigori_ was one of his father's flagships. What were the chances that it would be she who picked up their distress call?

"The only logical explanation is that my father was investigating the _Shibusen_ 's disappearance," Kidd had explained, pacing back and forth before them. "He must have had someone calculate the ship's trajectory and it landed them somewhere near here. It's the only way!"

Whatever the reason, the transport is here now, waiting to carry them back up to the _Grigori_ in orbit above them.

The group of ten stand near the front door, all staring out the window at the shiny black contraption that came to pick them up. Chrona, Medusa, and Stein are gobsmacked – this is technology far more advanced than any of them have ever seen. What with the rate that technology is developing these days, it's not surprising.

The transport lands, and its main engines cut out. Kidd's hand rests on the door, about to push it open, when the sudden silence gives way to a sound far worse than the rhythmic thrumming that filled their ears before.

 _Keeee-shiiiiiiin_. _Keeee-shiiiiin!_

The howling sends shivers down Soul's spine and pain sparking through the scar across his chest. For a brief moment, he flashes back to that horrible, horrible night, but the warmth of the hand in his grounds him back in reality. He takes a deep breath and ignores the concerned looks he's getting from Maka.

"We have to go," Stein says urgently. "They were likely attracted by the noise. The monsters – the kishin – are extremely territorial."

"Right," he hears Maka reply. "As soon as this door is open, we're all going to make a run for it. Agreed? Stein, Chrona, Medusa, you go first. I'll go last – I have the weapon, if need be."

Her tone leaves no room for argument, and everyone nods their agreement.

"Okay," she says softly. "Let's go."

And then they're fleeing the squat building which has been their sanctuary for the past week and a half. Soul is almost sad to see it go. Almost, but not quite. Together, the ten survivors run toward their only hope of salvation.

But Soul cannot run nearly as fast as the others. His injury screams at him even as he pushes through the fear of reopening the wound. He's falling behind, and yet still Maka stays behind him. Through all the pain clouding his brain, he has the thought that he doesn't want to be the reason she doesn't make it aboard the transport.

"You," he huffs, "should go on ahead. I'm just" – gasp – "slowing you down."

She grips her scythe harder. "Idiot!" she says, "I'm not leaving you behind!"

Soul knows it's a lost cause to try to argue with her, so he doesn't.

He's halfway to the transport when suddenly Chrona trips in front of him, going down hard. Their moan of pain is audible over the thrumming of the transport, and Medusa slows down, turning with a horrified look on her face. A single cry rips from her throat. "Chrona!"

"Keep moving!" Maka screams over the kishin's wails, which are getting closer. "I've got him!" She takes a deep breath as Stein grabs Medusa's arm and drags her forward. "Go, Soul. Help get everyone aboard safely. I'll be right behind you."

 _Keeeeeee-SHIIIN!_

Soul doesn't trust her. He's seen the holos – that's exactly what someone says when they're _not_ going to be following right behind. But he doesn't argue. He _can't_. And so his heart breaks as he rushes on ahead. The kishin are so much louder now, and it's all he can do not to turn around.

 _Maka's got this_ , he tells himself. _She'll be fine. We'll be fine_.

He passes Chrona's prone form and forces himself to keep moving. He would be no help in his current condition, and that familiar feeling of uselessness presses in on him once again. He reminds himself through pained lungs and wearied legs and a bleeding chest that _he saved Maka's life_ – twice, he remembers, the image of her frightened face as she dangled over the edge of the catwalk flashing through his head – and he's far from useless.

The droning of the transport drowns out the sounds of the kishin now, and it makes Soul uneasy. Gasping for breaths that are entirely inadequate at this point, he crosses the final yards to the metal ramp. His knees buckle as he tries to run up it, but Blake and Tsubaki are there immediately and hoist him up by his armpits, dragging him the rest of the way inside.

He collapses to the deck, the metal alloy cooling his cheek. He fights against the blackness threatening to obscure his vision as he asks, "Maka?"

Tsubaki bites her lip, and Soul worries. With all the strength he has left, he turns to face out the back of the transport. He immediately wishes he hadn't, and tears spring to his eyes.

Maka has Chrona lifted on her back, their arms and legs secured tightly around her. They keep their head down as Maka swings her scythe at the approaching kishin, backing toward the transport as quickly as possible. There are two of the creatures now, and by the sound of things, there are more on their way.

"Maka," he says pitifully, his throat dry and abused. "Maka!"

A woman he doesn't recognize shushes him gently. "Soul, right?" she asks, holding out a bottle of water. He nods. "Here, drink this," she says. "I'm Marie. I'm part of the crew that came to rescue you."

Soul takes the water gratefully even as he still fights the darkness at the edge of his vision. It's cold, clear, and didn't have to have the hell boiled out of it before he could drink it. He drinks too fast and coughs harshly, sending pain spiking through his reopened wound.

"Ma'am," a voice calls, "those creatures are getting closer. We need to take off soon, before they reach us."

"No!" Soul's cry is violent, bordering on a sob. He doesn't realize Medusa cried out as well. "You can't leave them here!"

"We won't," Marie assures him before calling back to the pilot, "Give us a couple more minutes!"

She, along with Tsubaki and Blake, help him up off the ground and into one of the seats lining the interior of the craft. He lets them strap him in, as all his attention is focused on Maka. She's just fending the kishin off at this point, allowing them to back her toward the ship. She says something to Chrona, who looks behind them and then yells something back.

Taking one last swipe at the nearest kishin, Maka turns tail and bolts. Soul's heart leaps into his throat. The kishin are fast, and now she's carrying extra weight with her as well. She's regained some of her strength in their time at the compound, but she's not nearly as strong as she once was.

"Ma'am, we've got to take off," the pilot says again more urgently. The response from everyone is a resounding "Wait!"

They're all holding their breath as Maka sprints for the transport. There's a horrified gasp as she stumbles, and then a relieved sigh as she rights herself before she plummets into the ground. The kishin are right on her tail. Oh, god, the kishin are right on her tail and one of them reaches out and swipes gouges clean through Chrona's back. They cry out in pain, and Maka pushes herself faster.

Almost there … almost there …. "Maka, come on!" Patty cries. "Just a little farther!"

The rest of the group joins her in shouting encouragements, and then finally – _finally_ – there's a sharp _clang_ as her boots hit the metal of the ramp. She takes only a few more steps, then turns around. "Chrona," she says, "I know it hurts. Can you make it up the ramp?"

Chrona carefully drops from her back and begins limping their way toward the rest of them. Medusa is quick to grab him and sweep him into a suffocating hug, avoiding his injuries, but it's not yet time to celebrate.

"Take off!" Maka screams as she stands at the edge of the ramp. "I'll hold off the kishin!"

"But … but that's _dangerous_ –"

"JUST _DO IT!_ "

Marie looks like she wants to argue, but the approaching kishin leave her with no choice. She turns to the pilot and relays the instruction. "Everyone strap yourselves in," she tells the rest of them, grabbing at one of the rope handles fastened to the top of the ship.

The main engines roar to life once more, and Maka adjusts her footing in order to keep her balance. As they begin their ascent, Soul can't help but think that Maka once again looks the part of an avenging angel, silhouetted against the sunlight of the foreign planet in a wide stance with her scythe held firmly at her side as her hair whips in the draft.

She strikes at a kishin. Then another, and another. Again and again she slices at their hands and other various body parts as she knocks them off the back of the ship. It's only once they're high enough that they're out of the monsters' reach that she surrenders her dignity and crawls up the ramp to the safety of the transport's interior.

"Close the back!" Marie screams to the pilot. The ramp folds up, and suddenly both the noise level and the wind level are greatly diminished. Maka stumbles to an open seat and drops both her scythe and bag to the floor before plunking down into it rather ungracefully. Very carefully, she threads one leg through the straps of her bag and keeps the other on the shaft of her scythe in order to keep them in place as she secures herself as well.

And then … that's it.

That's it, Soul realizes. They've survived. They've gotten off that godawful planet, _and_ with an extra three tagalongs as well. He groans as he thinks about the sheer number of press conferences he'll be subjected to as soon as they return to society.

"YAHOO!" Blake hollers. "WE DID IT! WE'RE ALIVE!"

"We're alive! We're alive!" Patty is the one who starts the chant, and they all, still a little delirious off adrenaline, join in with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Soul meets Maka's eyes across the ship. She looks exhausted, but he imagines he doesn't look much better, especially with the blood beginning to seep through the bandages and into his shirt. Still, as she forces a weary smile onto her face, he feels one beginning to form on his own.

Suddenly, he didn't mind so much the thought of all those press conferences. After all, they'd already done the hard part. They'd survived a spaceliner crash, a week out in totally hostile terrain with minimal rations, monstrous natives, infected wounds, _feelings_ , and more monstrous natives. Anything after this would be a walk in the park.

It's a half-hour flight back up to the _Grigori._ As soon as they're on board, they're all whisked in different directions, mostly to various parts of the infirmary to have their vitals and stats taken. Those with more severe injuries, like Soul and Chrona and even the Thompson sisters are then admitted for more intensive care. Soul comforts himself with the fact that Maka is on the ship somewhere, and that he'll see her when all this is over.

He tries to stay awake, really he does. But with his wound freshly bandaged, an IV in his arm, and a _comfortable_ mattress beneath him – not to mention real painkillers for once – he finds it hard to keep his eyes open. This is Kidd's father's ship, right? Soul doubts that any harm will come to them within the next few hours, and if something happens, then Kidd will vouch for them.

He yawns and then, listening to the drone of the heart monitor, drifts off to sleep.


	17. Chapter 17

**MAKA**

"Major Albarn, can you please describe to us the events which led to your pod being the only one to jettison from the _Shibusen_ properly?

Maka stifles an irritated sigh. She knew these interrogations would come, but she hadn't expected them so soon. Why is there a military presence on Mortimer Kidd, Sr.'s ship? Oh, right. They were actively searching for the downed _Shibusen._ Of course they would want to debrief her and Tsubaki immediately if they were found.

It's a miracle they waited even this long, really. Of all the many qualities the military possesses, patience is not one. She still has an IV in her arm, for crying out loud! Attempting to avoid a court-martial, though, she cooperates. IV drip and all.

"You'd be better off asking Elizabeth Thompson that question, sir," she says. "She's the one who rewired the system after it failed. My understanding of it, though, sir, is that there was a power surge after the _Shibusen_ fell out of hyperspace. It knocked out all systems, and the only reason we escaped is because of Thompson's electronics knowledge."

"It's convenient that you ended up in the same pod as Ms. Thompson and Mr. Kidd," the officer says, absentmindedly writing a note on his holo tablet.

"Indeed," Maka says. "I owe them my life."

"And, Major Albarn, why is it that the _Shibusen_ fell out of hyperspace?"

Maka wants to throw her hands up in the air incredulously, but she doesn't. "I don't know, sir," she says with false calm. "Kidd thinks we flew too close to the planet and got caught in the gravity well, but I do not know anything more. I was at the party that evening and was just finishing my conversation with Mr. Evans when the evacuation was announced. Why, are you accusing me of sabotaging the ship, sir?"

"Watch your mouth, Major. And for the record, I am not. I'm just covering all the bases." He checks his notes. "So you were aware that Mr. Soul Evans was aboard the _Shibusen_?"

"Not until after we were in the escape pod, sir. He never gave me his last name."

"But surely you recognized him for who he was. His features are unmistakable, and he is quite the public figure."

"Colonel, with all due respect, I'd been in the field for two years, and then was thrust into the spotlight myself. I was not paying much attention to the celebrity news on the holos."

"Major Albarn, are you or are you not in an alleged affair with Mr. Soul Evans?"

The question comes out of left field, but Maka does not let it faze her. "'Affair' would imply that either he or I was not single in the first place, sir, and was cheating on someone else. That is all I will say. I do not appreciate the way you keep trying to implicate me in wrongdoing."

The interrogation continues in that vein. The colonel hurls thinly veiled accusations at her, and she refutes them calmly despite her growing ire. She knows that losing her temper now won't do anyone any good, but it's hard after two weeks of absolute freedom to say and act how she pleased.

"Are we done here, sir?" she asks a half hour later as the officer flounders to come up with more probing questions. She can tell he wants to keep her there, if just to keep lording his superiority over the infamous Major Albarn, but he has no more excuses despite her impertinence.

"You are dismissed," he says at last.

Maka stands sharply, the muscles in her legs protesting. The muscles in her _everything_ protesting, really. She salutes him, but the movement is sloppy as she tries not to jostle the lead in her arm. She turns and walks out the door without a word, pushing the IV stand ahead of her.

Okay, so it's not the most dramatic exit she's ever made.

She slowly makes her way back down the hall to the room she shares with Tsubaki, feeling out of place on this sleek ship without her uniform. But as her uniform was torn to shreds and incinerated in the makeshift hearth of the compound, she is forced to make do with the white t-shirt and drawstring pants the nurse provided for her. At least she can tie the string tight enough to actually keep the pants on her hips.

Tsubaki isn't alone in their room. The nurse is there too, and Maka's mood is immediately lifted as she sees she is removing Tsubaki's IV drip. That means hers will be next, and she can't wait to get rid of the blasted thing.

"Has it already been twenty-four hours?" she asks as she perches on the edge of the bed assigned to her. "Wow."

Of course, most of that had been spent in a drug-assisted sleep. As a general rule, Maka is not a fan of sedatives, but damn do they work well. She had been so deeply asleep that she hadn't noticed the constant prick in her arm or the cold, empty space beside her where Soul was not.

She feels his lack of presence now, though. Achingly.

It's these thoughts that run through her head as she is finally freed from the confines of the IV drip. She doesn't notice the bruise it leaves behind. There are enough of those on her body now – what's one more?

She sighs heavily. "Have you seen any of the others?" she asks Tsubaki. The other girl nods.

"Blake and Kidd are in the room a few doors down from us," she says, "despite the fact Kidd's father offered to let him stay in the master suite with him. Liz and Patty are still in the infirmary – they're being watched for infection, and been instructed to stay off their feet for the time being. Chrona's in the infirmary as well, but they're not in the compound, so they're happy."

"And … Soul?" Maka asks hesitantly. She hasn't seen him since they were shunted off separate ways, over twenty-four hours ago now. She wishes she hadn't been required to attend that stupid debriefing, or else she would have joined Tsubaki in visiting their friends.

"He reopened his wound in that sprint," Tsubaki says, "but he's doing fine. He was asleep when I went in to see everyone."

"Oh."

"Maka," the other girl hedges, "what are we going to do?"

Her voice is pained, and it suddenly strikes Maka that Tsubaki is going through the same exact thing that she is. Lieutenant Tsubaki Nakatsukasa, in love with the socialite Blake Barrett. Major Maka Albarn, very possibly in love with the socialite Soul Evans. Both of them will be returning to active duty, most likely on the front lines, and they're both faced with the very real possibility of never seeing either of the men again.

Immediately, Maka feels guilty for being so obsessed with her own troubles that she didn't notice those of her friend. Tsubaki has been dealing with these thoughts for longer than she has, too.

She bites her lip as she thinks about Tsubaki's question. She knows now that she never wants to give Soul up, but she also knows that she needs to do what's best for both of them. What will be fair for both of them. And so really, she has only one answer.

"We're going to live," she says simply. "We're going to go back out there, and we're going to do our job and do it well so that we might live to see the possibilities on the other side." She shrugs and looks over at the fellow soldier who has become her closest friend, after Soul. "I'm gonna go out for a while, I think. Pace the deck, gather my thoughts and all that. You … should take advantage of the time. If you know what I mean."

Without checking to see if Tsubaki understands what she's insinuating, Maka leaves the room, letting the door slide shut behind her. It closes with a soft little _hiss_ , and she stands there for just a moment, taking a deep breath of filtered air before continuing down the hall. When she's a fair distance away, she hears the door open once again and footsteps going in the opposite direction.

Maka smiles to herself.

She wanders the _Grigori_ aimlessly, greeting the occasional passerby with a polite nod. The smile has since slipped from her face, and she does not feel the need to force it back. Why should she, when she's already facing the beginning of the end?

Her travels eventually lead her up to the main observation deck. Her breath catches as she gazes down at the planet on which they were marooned, illuminated against a backdrop of an infinite number of stars. From up here, it's beautiful. It's deceivingly peaceful, seemingly untouched by human hands. But she knows better.

She knows better than anyone save for the nine others who boarded the _Grigori_ at the same time she did.

There's a guardrail a few feet back from the spotless, expansive window, and she leans her elbows on it gratefully as she considers the expanse before her. She and the others are all so insignificant, pinpricks in life as small as the pinprick of light emanating from the farthest star. Life went on before her, and it will continue after she's gone.

It's a humbling thought.

She doesn't know how long she stands there watching the stars slide by as the _Grigori_ orbits the planet below. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. She suspects it's somewhere in between.

"I thought I might find you here."

Maka blinks, turning away from the hypnotizing panorama before her. Her heart leaps as her eyes fall on sanguine eyes and ruffled white hair, and suddenly everything is all right with the world again. How can she feel so insignificant when he's looking at her like she's everything?

She smiles wryly. "Well, here I am," she says.

He laughs softly as he approaches the railing to join her. "I stopped by your room first, actually," he says. "That was a mistake."

"Blake and Tsubaki? Yeah, I told her I'd be out for a while. I'm sorry you had to see that."

He shrugs. "I get it," he says, sliding a hand into hers. She takes it and squeezes gratefully, and no more words pass between them for several minutes. It's only the stars and their sound of their breathing that fill the space between them.

"It's beautiful," Soul says at last. "It's hard to believe we were fighting for our lives down there."

Maka agrees. "But in a way," she muses, "that just makes it even more beautiful, don't you think? I don't know. I might just be losing my mind."

"No, no, I get what you're saying."

There's a reason shooting stars never return to their place in the sky. For if they did, they would no longer glow as bright as they once did. How could they, when all they would long for is the feel of the ground beneath them, one they might never touch again? No, it's better they go out in a blaze of glory and leave that for people to remember.

But these two stars, well, they don't have a choice.

Maka cannot tell who moves first. All she knows is that one second she's staring out the window at the cold expanse of space, and the next she's engulfed by the warmth that never fails to send tingles down her spine and through her extremities. She leans into the kiss, parting her lips beneath his and burying her hands into hair that's brighter and softer than any starlight. He pulls her hips closer, and then his hands crawl their way up her back until she feels so _safe_ that she never wants to leave.

She doesn't notice the tears streaming down his face at first, but when she does, she realizes she's crying as well. Soul's hand creeps up even further and pulls the tie from her hair, allowing it to tumble down around her shoulders. As she grips him tighter, pulls him closer, she stifles a sob into his mouth. She's not ready for this. She's not ready to let go.

Their kisses gradually subside from desperately passionate to tender and sweet, and right before they break apart he kisses her so sweetly that she buries her face into his chest to hide the new tears that well up in her eyes. They stand there, simply holding each other under the light of the stars, for several minutes.

At last, Maka sniffles. "It's not fair," she says, refusing to meet his eyes. "It's not fair to you for me to be feeling this way. At the Academy – as soldiers – we're _trained_ not to let our emotions hinder our ability to make rational decisions. But guess what?" She smiles a watery smile as she finally looks up at him. "I done fucked up."

A snort of laughter escapes Soul, and he apologizes when she glares at him. "Sorry," he says. "It's just the way you phrased that so brilliantly."

"Soul," she whines, and he kisses her again.

"I meant what I said back there, at the compound," he says softly, as serious as she's ever seen him. "I'll wait. I'll wait forever if need be."

Maka blinks. "But what if – what if I don't come back?" she asks fearfully. "I'm on the front lines, Soul. I can't do this to you."

"You're _not_ doing this to me. I'm doing this to myself. And if you don't – if you don't come back, I guess I'll try to move on. It's what you'd want me to do."

"Damn right it would be."

Soul snorts once again, and then they fall into a comfortable silence. Gradually, they begin swaying, dancing to a tune only they can hear. It's a tune of melancholy, but also of hope, and it's a dance that's been a long time coming. A dance that started with dress blues, a pinstriped suit, and neon drinks.

When Maka feels the tremors wracking his chest, she looks up in concern. "What's wrong," she begins to say, only to realize that he's not crying, but rather trying to stifle laugher.

He winces in pain as he finally laughs aloud, and several moments pass before he composes himself enough to answer her unspoken question. "Mother is going to be so displeased with me when I tell her. And Father. Wes will probably just question my sanity."

Maka's lips form an inaudible "Oh," as she remembers. "That's right," she says. "Your matchmaking mother. I nearly forgot." Her lips curl in what could be described as an evil smirk as she remembers what else she said that evening. "Well, she and the society girls better give it up," she says, leaning up on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, "because while jealous looks may not be fatal, I still had a ninety percent hit accuracy in the Academy."

She backs away and winks at him, and his stunned expression is everything worth living for in that moment. "Why, you –" he never finishes his sentence, because his lips are on hers again.

Neither knows what lies in their future. Their promises are cobbled together with good intentions and a fair amount of starlight, but the galaxy is endless and the void is dark and infinite. They're going to bend. They're going to break. They're going to shatter along the stress fractures that life has left them with. But if they manage not to lose themselves along the way, they will have the opportunity to pick up the pieces of their broken souls and glue them back together into something even more beautiful than starlight.

Something perfect.

Something infallible.

Something _real_.

 **\- fin -**


End file.
